December 30, 2011

Girl with a Dragon Tattoo is a movie full of unintentional paradoxes. It’s based on a widely-read book that has already been adapted into a motion picture, but it’s surprisingly hung up on its own plot. It doesn’t want to pander by underlining anything for its audience, but it’s so packed with dialogue that it strains under the weight of its own exposition. Problematic or clunky storytelling are usually benign flaws, but in Dragon Tattoo it’s a grave shortcoming, as audiences are encouraged to whoop-whoop their way through a sickening scene intended to wipe the slate clean for the movie’s second half.

A slick and meaningless opening title sequence (Bond credits outfitted in Goth leather) opens the film, providing commercial packaging for the movie’s negligent treatment of challenging sexual politics. In the first few scenes we meet Mikael Blomkvist, who we learn has suffered a professional scandal relayed via news broadcasts and his sullen reactions to them. Because of the disgrace, Blomkvist leaves town to take a job with rich mogul Henrik Vanger (Christopher Plummer) who wants Blomkvist to investigate the disappearance of his niece, which happened 40 years ago. This takes a mighty long time to get to, and it’s even longer before Blomkvist enlists the help of hacker supreme and title girl Lisbeth Salander (Rooney Mara).

The scandal that drives Blomkvist out of town is given enough detail to give him motivation but not enough to be of much interest. At the end of the movie, after Blomkvist and Salander have solved the disappearance of the niece, this subplot returns, makes the movie 30 minutes longer, and pays zero dividends. There’s really no reason (aside from catering to the presumably large base of fans of the book) that the movie can’t start with Blomkvist showing up at Vanger’s as a reporter with a mysterious past. It’s exactly the kind of clumsiness that all of Dragon Tattoo suffers from: front-loading an element of the story, using it as a device to move the story forward, then resolving it to the satisfaction of no one who asks more of a movie than that its plot work itself out. There’s a going-through-the-motions quality to all of it, even through the kinetic bits that rush by with Fincher’s flair for movement and efficiency in action sequences.

Being finicky about the storytelling technique in a major Hollywood release is a little like going to a bullfight and complaining about animal cruelty, but in Dragon Tattoo a bigger problem is revealed by the treatment of plot. It’s a whodunit that puts a lot of emphasis on exactly who done exactly what, but the mystery at its center isn’t very surprising or exciting. It is, however, really icky. Dragon Tattoo has multiple rape scenes, and while the source material is reputed to be a schlocky feminist revenge fantasy, Fincher’s adaptation is unconvincing in this regard.

Salander is a ward of the state who depends on a public official for her allowance. The official asks that she come to his home to collect a check, where he brutally violates her. Fincher’s treatment of the scene isn’t really problematic in itself, but it’s just another gear-creaking front-loading of a plot element. It’s real horror, but it also has that going-through-the-motions slog that the rest of the plot does. Compare this to Fincher’s Zodiac, in which pieces don’t always fit together and the large canvas and ambling storytelling are part of the movie’s ideas about truth and order.

Dragon Tattoo has none of the self awareness that Zodiac does, and Salander’s rape exists only so that she can come back later for an even more grotesque scene that practically has an APPLAUSE sign flashing above it. The hooting and hollering that I heard at my screening in Times Square was disturbing, not because people were cheering violence, but because the audience felt washed clean of the earlier rape scene, excited to be rewarded for watching their dragon-tattooed girl suffer a tragedy so that she may vindicate herself by inflicting worse pain on her tormentor later. The terror of what happened to Salander is mitigated by the forward movement of the plot. If you don’t think this is simplistic slate-clearing, ask yourself how it is that Salander, someone who’s suffered so horribly at the hands of men, slides so easily into bed with Blomkvist later.

This flippant treatment of meting out justice returns later, when Salander asks Blomkvist for permission to kill someone. The scene is troubling not only because of the brutish concept of justice it adopts but in the way it shows a woman granting this high moral authority to a male. All of this talk about women, violence, and revenge in movies brings Tarantino to mind, but can you imagine Jackie Brown, The Bride, or Shosanna asking for male permission to go do damage?

Tarantino’s movies are flippant about violence and loose with their gender politics, but they’re also comical and self-aware in the extreme, while Fincher’s latest movie has a sleek, cold ignorance about what it’s up to. Dragon Tattoo is offensive, not necessarily because Fincher seems so unaware of the sexual politics in his own movie, but because he treats it so sloppily. His movie has no ideas, only plot arrangements. You can’t just move around pieces of a story like building blocks and be satisfied that the whole thing stands up. When the pervasive and horrific problems of misogyny and rape are put in the service of this simplistic block-building, you wind up with a problematic movie that has a sickening obliviousness about its own content.

December 07, 2011

You can read my review of Melancholia at the Independent website, in which I write that Lars von Trier expresses the same anxiety as the young Alvy Singer depressed about the end of the universe, but with Wagnerian grandiosity rather than Allen's comedic specificity.

December 06, 2011

I get all over My Week with Marilyn's case, saying it's a lazy exercize in mythologizing the mythical and calling it "genuinely threatening to a healthy culture of art-making" in a review you can read in full here. I don't mention the egregious union-bashing scene (that is also dishonest, as it tries to say it's for unions, but not the bad bits) that would have negated any of the good qualities of My Week with Marilyn, had there been any.

I did not offer up a take on Michelle Williams' performance, because it's irrelevant. In a movie that wants to do nothing but emphasize what we already figured we knew about an icon of questionable importance, the best Williams can do is imitate our pre-existing ideas about the role she's playing. Had she wanted to do anything adventurous, it would have been squashed by the team behind this movie, I'm sure. Also, I think it's healthy for writers to ignore performances in movies that are made exclusively to show off a conventional style of acting and hold them accountable for the rest of thing things at play.

Writing about this movie brought up something I think about a lot while reviewing small movies. When I think a movie is especially lazy or meaningless, and I'm writing about it for the Independent, I think it's important not to get worked up about it unless it's a movie that's getting a lot of misguided attention, or that will have some kind of impact on the culture. I'm reviewing movies in a small market and these so-called art house films play at theaters that are constantly struggling to keep the lights on. Providing a thoughtful take (rather than an incensed rant) about a movie I don't care for is better for everyone involved.

So it's always with hesitation that I give such a forcefully negative review to a small, unimportant movie playing at small theaters in a small market. I've often written first drafts that I've rethought and rewritten after realizing that I'm not really serving my function as a minor movie critic with such negative reviews of small pictures. My job is to get people thinking and talking about movies, and hopefully to get them excited about continuing to go to the movies. Bashing modest movies does none of those things.

I've glanced at some reviews of Marilyn since writing about it, and I'm very surprised at what positive reception it's receiving. David Denby called My Week with Marilyn "intentionally minor," which may have been his way of apologizing for also calling it "expertly made." There's nothing wrong with being minor on purpose: it's a great path to subversion. If Altman had announced ahead of time that he had such wacky intentions for how to shoot M*A*S*H, that movie wouldn't exist. But Marilyn is the opposite: it's an intentionally minor movie that takes no advantages of its potential to go rogue off the radar. It plays by all the rules even though it probably doesn't even have to. That's the worst kind of towing the line.

Marilyn deserves bad-mouthing because its shimmery brand of meaninglessness is menacing. It's dishonest, masquerading as shimmery fun when in fact it exists in order to make us feel better about our lazy presumptions. It's a stupid movie that wants us to be stupid. I guess most crappy narratives do this, but when offhand acceptance of convention meets with iconic subject matter it becomes more dangerous. It has more potential to get into the drinking water.

April 23, 2010

I have always really liked Noah Baumbach's movies, and credit quoting Kicking and Screaming with being the foundation of at least one great friendship. So maybe I took it a little personally when he finally let me down. Check it out here.

September 09, 2009

Here's a link to the archive at Independent Weekly, in case you want to catch up with what I've been writing about. Films include Paper Heart, (500) Days of Summer, Funny People, Brothers Bloom, Bruno, Sugar, and Whatever Works.

April 16, 2009

State of Play is (marginally) about the rivalry between print media and on-line news, the romantic notions of the former versus the inevitable shift to the latter. The movie cops out in every conceivable way and Russell Crowe is--as usual--an indignant meathead, but there are things to like about this movie, even in the way it shamelessly shoehorns itself in alongside All the President's Men on the journalism-conspiracy reel rack. Here's what I wrote about it.

The best thing about watching State of Play was coming around (a little) on Rachel McAdams, who I've never liked. She should have played it a little nerdier, but was still a nice foil for Crowe. Have I mentioned I think he's a meathead?

April 08, 2009

One Day You'll Understand is the first Amos Gitai movie I've ever seen, and I'm glad I did. Read all about it. I especially like the relationship between image and sound in the first scenes, as one character is listening to the same public trial that her son's assistant is listening to on the radio at work.

March 17, 2009

Che in its entirety is the hype. Che Part I by itself is still pretty hype. Read the review here. It's not exactly what I promised, a big think piece, but it'll do. BTW, does anyone want more of this stuff? (Also, can saying "bee tee dubz" replace "by the way"?)

February 25, 2009

There's a lot of stuff like the above image in Waltz. Weird, metaphoric, disturbing, like that Ralph Bakshi-type stuff.

But there's a lot of stuff like this image, too. People sitting at bars or in their kitchens, or even in front of generic backdrops, just talking. The talking heads convention is bad enough in documentaries that don't have the outlet of the animation arsenal of freakout machinery that Waltz does.

A movie this arresting and original in some places has no excuse to be so boring and conventional in others.

January 14, 2009

I have hardly seen any Edward Zwick movies (although I did watch a few too many episodes of that quarterlife thing). The only other motion picture of his that I've seen is Glory, which I don't have any desire to revisit, but it did offer up one of the first indelible movie images of my childhood: someone's head getting blown clean off in battle. I think this image had something to do with making me almost entirely anti-war. So, something good came of a Zwick movie. Credit where it is due. Unfortunately, there's no credit to dole out for Defiance, which I reviewed here.

I really can't believe how tempered the criticism of this offensive movie has been.

I don't know if it matters, but here is what Daniel Craig looks like ...

November 29, 2008

Here's a personal review of JCVD in which I discuss the action icon, his new movie, my first R-rated movie, and YouTube. Did you like this movie? The more I thought about it, the more I wanted to, but I think it's a pretty lazy effort despite what could have been a good performance from Van Damme.

Above: Van Damme in Bloodsport. Here's a link to the clip mentioned in the article.

November 06, 2008

My review of Contempt is up at the Independent site. Watching it again, I was surprised that it surpassed my high expectations. You can read it here. And if you missed it, last week was a review ofRachel Getting Married. Thanks for reading.

October 15, 2008

The Independent Weekly is running my review of Charlie Chaplin's Monsieur Verdoux. You can read it here. Verdoux opens on Friday (Oct 17). If you live in New York, you can catch it at Cinema Village. If you live in or around Raleigh/Durham/Chapel Hill/Cary, it's at Galaxy.

January 30, 2008

Nathan Gelgud is back, and he's picked his ten favorite films of 2007.

***

Ninth and Tenth Place, the not-really-2007 slots:

Killer of Sheep is probably the best movie I saw all year, and is also the best-reviewed movie of the year. It deserves a higher place on the list, but calling a 1977 film the best movie of 2007 seems strange, even though Jonathan Rosenbaum is right when (in his Top 10 list this year) he says we need to reassess that kind of thinking.

The other non-2007 entry is a stunning shot-for-shot recreation that shows that the more honestly you copy, the more potentially unique you get. Fans might consider asking themselves why they didn't bother with Gus van Sant's Psycho remake.

***

Seventh and Eighth Place, The Unbiography and the Nonadaptation

Honestly not one of the most exciting moviegoing experiences I had this year, but a venture that was successful by virtue of its conceit. Whittle down a literary classic of imposing length to very few scenes, then play those scenes out for so long that they go past sunset, leaving the viewer literally in the dark.

Cate Blanchett's not the real draw here, and neither really is the semi-subversiveness of the multi-actor casting. I think J. Hoberman already did a fine job of pointing out that this is a wonderful anti-biopic, but it's different from Quixotic in that it wins as a movie movie, not just as an exercise. The way Haynes does detail makes the minutiae just as important as the postmodern conceit, and his attention to setting and architecture propels I'm Not There out of the realm of think piece and into something a little more honest. In the Heath Ledger segment, a movie set looks so like a movie set that Haynes's movie gains from the comparison, becoming believable, and this couldn't have been accomplished without Haynes's sharp eye. In the Dylan-as-minister segment, Christian Bale is too big for the room, the ceiling's too low, his clothes dishonestly modest, as Dylan tries to recede from icon to commoner. If the details weren't always in the right place, you wouldn't be sure that so many little things were coming together so well.

***

Sixth Place, The One That Delivers

Where Quixotic is most fascinating for what it shoots for, and I'm Not There is great for the smaller things, Diving Bell is the one that follows through on what you thought it would. Your legs get tight and the women look like angels. Schnabel, one of the biggest personalities of the art world Eighties, is turning out to be surprisingly delicate with the egos of others.

***

Fifth Place, The Big Flaw

If Quixotic is the movie perhaps better on paper and Diving Bell is essentially about the execution, No Country is the one that's almost too perfect. Not until the worst part of this movie--which might have been the worst part of any movie of the year--did I realize how immaculate the rest of it was. The Mama's Family (thanks, Justin) moment featuring the hillbilly mother is just enough to make me love something that might have otherwise seemed suspiciously flawless.

***

Fourth Place, the Companion Piece

While History of Violence played cute with what we wanted from our action movies, Eastern Promises delivered it. I'm not up for calculating the trade-off, but the way Cronenberg plays so directly with our involvement and expectations without condescending or kitsching lets Eastern Promises operate in a movie universe all its own, one where what's essentially a first act can feel like a fully realized epic.

***

Third Place, The Four-Hundred Pound Termite

Other great films this year were fascinating for their fluidity from concept to result or for the way their flaws made them better. While these movies were working things out on the screen, Frownland was reaching into the audience, screaming and pulling people's hair. Google Ronnie Bronstein's debut feature, which played festivals and a few local movie houses in '07, read some viewer comments, and you'll see that this study in dividing the audience is clawing people's eyes out and eating away at their polite ideas of what movies should be. The mutant version of what Manny Farber thought of as a termite movie, Frownland is finally getting a run at IFC this year. I'm sure it will be one of the ten best commercially released movies of 2008, but I couldn't wait to get it on the list.

***

Second Place, Probably Perfect

At times, Phillippe Garrel's film is transplanted completely from its supposed subject matter, making dreams out of riots. Regular Lovers moves from the iconography and tumultuousness of the ever-symbolic year of 1968 to a quieter meditation on its young characters' personalities. Taking not only the artsy youngsters as its subject, but some of the adults and authority figures as well (a cop who appreciates art), Lovers is interested in everyone on the screen in a way that, say, There Will Be Blood is not.

***

First Place, The Seam-Splitter

While one glaring problem illuminated the seamlessness of No Country, Margot picks at its seams like scabs until the whole thing is ready to split. Uneven and often too literal, the way it stays scattershot instead of settling suits this multiple character study. What makes it even more complicated is that it's turning its eye on characters who might be behaving very differently than they normally do (a reunion, a marriage, a possible divorce, one and a half affairs). "I think the neighbors are mad because we're ..." says Jack Black, trailing off, before muttering "I don't know what we are." Cutting into scenes that seem to have already begun (where a lesser filmmaker might have used jumpcuts within said scenes) keeps fragments floating and jagged, especially when the frenzy slams into the sudden appearance of a disarmingly stable John Turturro in close-up. Also anchored by the virtuoso camera work of Harris Savides, whose low lighting often looks like it's about to give out, as scenes perch on the dimness threshold that Quixotic pushes past. Too supposedly cynical for some, I find a touching affection in the way that Margot grants its characters so many scenes and set-ups to work out their frustrations and inadequacies, and allows them to be funny in the process.

October 08, 2007

Superficially, Darjeeling Limited is about family, but really, it’s about whiteness. In fact, it is literally about being a white man, that is, about being a Whitman. Wes Anderson’s latest follows the Whitmans, a family that’s fractured after their father’s funeral, through India. It’s the first time Anderson’s had more than a few non-whites in one of his movies (remember his black-free Harlem in Tenenbaums?), perhaps to set the pale into sharper relief.

How can the Whitmans afford this whimsical journey? We don’t find out; Darjeelingis obscenely casual about its characters’ wealth. But in a movie about whiteness, such trivial finances are beside the point. Emotional landscape is all that matters here, which is why even when they’re all kicked off the train they can still get around so easily. This movie isn’t about privileged people, it’s about privilege itself, and there’s no better way to probe the problems of the privileged heart than to eliminate everything but emotional difficulties. For guys like these, all obstacles are self-imposed.

The lack of a cultural identity has been sending whites to India (at least) since The Beatles, and the movie’s ripe for dealing with the white weakness for otherness. But then, dealing with displacement is difficult in the anal-retentive world of precision that is a Wes Anderson picture, because nothing can be misplaced. It’s all too perfect—when the four brothers scamper down a hillside in a wide angle long shot, it has the self-contained look of a snow globe scene. Cultural co-opting aside, the temples, countryside, and bronzy skin of the natives make for a nifty backdrop for this well-played story about emotionally malfunctioning rich kids, and it plays well inside its snow globe. Darjeeling’s got a lot going for it, and part of its appeal is the rapport between Owen Wilson, Adrien Brody, and Jason Schwartzman.

The way that Darjeeling Limited winds up with whiteness and wealth as its implied topics is an accident—its perspective isn’t wide enough to see outside its own (very watchable) characters. Still, Darjeeling works. There is no distance between filmmaker and subject, between film and filmed. This isn’t an ego movie; Anderson loves his characters too much to make a movie about himself. There is, however, a charming synthesis between Anderson’s method, his characters’ neuroses, and the feel of the resulting film.

Take Anderson’s protagonist, Francis (Wilson), essentially a guy who’s trying to do something good. He wants to reunite with his brothers, reunite them with their mother, and get them all to recover from the death of their father. He wants to achieve a pure spiritual connection. And he wants his act to be grand, a train trip through India.

Darjeeling Limited is directed by a guy who’s doing the same thing, trying to do something good. He wants to make a movie about redeeming yourself, about recovering from pain, about unconditional love. He wants the emotional center of Darjeelingto be so palpable that he pumps up the volume on a heartbeat near the movie’s middle. And he grabs at grandiosity, achieving it enough not to be grotesque.

Both Anderson and his protagonist are so meticulous, self-conscious, and controlling about their endeavors that they threaten to squeeze the life out of them, but their intentions are too good for anything to get too screwed up. Francis keeps an hour-by-hour bonding itinerary, and Anderson’s movies suffer from overly precise framing and dialogue timing. Anderson and Francis tinker too much for their own good, they’re precious about their possessions and their interests, and they don’t care about the bigger picture. They are both maddeningly obsessed with detail, Francis with an itemized inventory of his deceased father’s estate, Anderson with every detail on the set. It’s fetishistic.

But Francis and Anderson are also very funny, and their meticulousness pays off in many small dividends. Francis’s itineraries are laminated, which is amusing enough, but it’s played for double the laughs when he tries to rip one up.

And they’re good-hearted. The three brothers come to the rescue of some Indian boys in peril, which mission gives Peter (Brody) something to redeem himself for in the future (involving his own son) and brings some of Francis’s goals to fruition, as they all get a chance to redeem themselves for missing their father’s funeral. The maneuver is way too convenient to be effective, and forget about dealing with the troubling white-man-to-the-rescue scenario. Still, as clumsy as some of Darjeeling’s plot turns are, they’re never there out of commitment to narrative, but devotion to empathy. And the gauche big-heartedness of the movie almost makes up for Anderson’s obliviousness about a bigger social and cultural picture. There is a very likeable movie in Darjeeling that beats up on its characters enough to achieve an ease of empathy with them, even if never enough to make the Whitmans seem less than impenetrable to anyone who’s not a rich white man.

August 21, 2007

Film Forum ran a double feature of Fritz Lang’s Scarlet Street and Anthony Mann’s Side Street on Sunday and Monday, and they’re two of the best films I’ve seen lately.

Scarlet Street is about Christopher Cross (Edward G. Robinson), an amateur painter who falls for Kitty (Joan Bennett), a girl who’s scamming him out of money he doesn’t really have. Chris sets himself up for the swindle by letting her believe he’s a major artist with paintings worth thousands of dollars. Kitty pretends to be an actress. The deception begins after they meet in the street, and Chris asks her to have a drink. It’s a great scene and the fact that they’re right beneath her apartment and keep talking about how late it is gives the scene some serious sex appeal. You almost forget that Robinson can’t be sexy, and that’s precisely the thing his character would like Kitty to do. From there, Lang keeps teasing out the flirtation between Chris and Kitty until it's clear Chris is desperate for her and refuses to believe she’s in it for anything but love. The way the relationship is drawn is devastating: according to common movie knowledge, the girl should go for him at least a little, but she never even considers it.

Before we’re certain that their affection is completely one-sided, the two have lunch and Chris describes how making a painting is like falling in love. (Another great thing about Scarlet Streetis in how much detail it shows Chris’s wacky paintings.) At lunch, it starts to look like Kitty’s falling for Chris a little during his soliloquy, but as soon as he looks the other way her face screws up into mockery. The rest of the movie hinges on these kinds of details – if the first scene wasn’t alluring, Chris’s designs on Kitty would be too pathetic to carry the movie – and Lang fills the film with little touches that lesser movies might not bother with.

Because it's an Anthony Mann movie, Side Street is similarly interested in detail, as well as great action sequences and even greater locations. The best stuff is inside a bar where Farley Granger leaves a bundle of stolen money.The scenes in the bar are the ones that come immediately to mind when you think of Side Street because the details are spot-on, and Mann constructs the place with the depth of the academy frame he’s so good at utilizing.

Most of the activity in the bar takes place in the back, and Mann’s camera puts the action in the foreground, with sidewalk-level windows in the background. These scenes are the most tense, and the action hinges on all this little stuff, like a desperate Granger at the bar asking about an address without letting on why he really needs it. Meanwhile, Mann keeps the window far in the background, full of sidewalk action. And in between, he has all these extras moving around and talking to each other, and he gets all the details of a mid-afternoon bar just right. It’s an early example of Mann’s great use of depth, something he’d perfect in his pre-Cinemascope westerns. Add Granger’s nerves and the peculiarities of the bar (there are two counters in the place, one on either side), the effortless details, and it heightens the scene with a unique energy. This feeling of tension gets a concrete setting in the bar, and it becomes the center of Side Street. Little moments in movies don’t get any better than these kinds of scenes, these kinds of locations.

Both films are available on DVD; Side Street comes with Nicholas Ray’s They Live by Night, which also stars Farley Granger and Cathy O’Donnell.

June 19, 2007

Ocean’s Thirteen is not a masterpiece, but it might have been.Ocean’s Twelve got close.It was a very exciting movie.

The Ocean’s movies are exciting because they take as their subject the actors who are playing around inside of them.It makes them either clever or grotesque, depending on your perspective.The best example of this is in the best film of the series, Ocean’s Twelve, in the scene on the airplane in which Matt Damon approaches George Clooney and Brad Pitt to plead for a bigger part in the heist.His character doesn’t want to play in the junior leagues anymore.Effectively, he’s saying “I can do this, I can be one of you."He’s playing an ingénue thief in a gang of veteran heist-pullers, but really he’s playing himself, begging to be as big a star as Clooney and Pitt.It’s a cute scene, a filler in a film of fluff, but it vibrates, and it’s funny.

The reason it’s funny is that Damon pulls it off so well.He pulls it off so well because there is no distance between the fictional scene and the actual Hollywood moment.Which is the reason it vibrates.This kind of circularity prevents the Ocean’s movies from becoming profound (from being masterpieces), but it’s by running in circles that they hit their marks so well on each rotation.It’s hit to good effect in the beginning of Twelve as well, when Pitt is introduced, slumming it as a motel proprietor, trying to keep TV-to-film up-and-comer Topher Grace from tearing up his room.

Twelve is rife with this stuff, and it’s quite clever if it doesn't nauseate you. The real cringe-tester is the finale wherein Julia Roberts literally pretends to be Julia Roberts. Here Soderbergh brings the meta-theme out in the open after teasing it for humor (on the plane, in the motel) and makes it what the last act is all about.The gamble makes Twelve either a flower in full bloom or an ugly open wound.But it's honest, because it lets these stars do exactly what they want to do – goof off and make big bucks – and has fun with it.

The Ocean’s movies are fulfilling exactly what they are supposed to, and not in a condescending way where they’re making fun of Hollywood.They celebrate Hollywood in all its insignificance but don’t miss out on the fun of the glitz.Surprisingly, there is no mockery, which is a difficult thing to pull off – it’s an awareness-without-distance kind of thing.It’s totally minor, but it’s also weird and sneaky, which is what makes it great, even in light of its modest ambitions.

If you’re not convinced, it might be because this all sounds like a lot of praise for the oldest bore in the movie business – Hollywood making a show of patting itself on the back (think Oscar night).But I don’t think that’s quite what the Ocean’s movies are.A little context might help, like the relationship of Soderbergh’s smaller films to his Hollywood ones.We can see in his small movies that he's very interested in finding a way to test the limits of the movie medium, and only intermittently successful at it.Still, a quick skip through his non-Hollywood stuff shows how hard he’s trying.Solaris and Limey are both strong, terse, formally assured little movies. Full Frontal is a bad movie but a sincere effort to peel back a layer of filmmaking and test how hard he can make you believe in something superficial.Schizopolis is a working-through of his own psychological complexes, a venture into how interior a comedy can be and still get laughs.If for no other reason, Kafka is worthy because it’s the problematic movie he chose to make when he could have done anything he wanted (after the success of Sex, Lies, and Videotape).The Good German is bland at best, but in making a movie with the technological limitations of 1945 he seemed to be saying that movies can be about the way they're made.Which is, of course, very similar to the way the Ocean’s movies are about themselves. (To finish out my take on his small stuff I still need to see Bubble.)

What’s funny about someone who’s made so many little movies is that he actually works the best in the glossy big budget context.So, in considering his “arty” pictures in relation to his Ocean’s movies, his body of work gathers this kind of reversal effect: he’s more artful when he’s not making an art film.Even detractors note how breezy his movies are.It’s as though when he has a big budget, or has to deliver a big film for a big studio (Traffic, Erin Brockovich, the Ocean’s movies), he’s thinking, "Ho hum, should I make the best Hollywood movie of the year, a surefire blockbuster, or both?”

Then when he makes Solaris or Good German he's really trying to make it work and can't quite pull it off.The sincerity and what it produces adds context to the Ocean’s movies, and Twelve is where that tension is really churning, and everyone's having the most fun, and the story – pulling an unpullable number of heists in a sliver of time – gives Soderbergh the excuse to gallivant all over the globe.The movie benefits from the way that the pond-hopping antics of the crew emphasize the exaggerated excess of the film.

In Ocean’sThirteen, Damon has perhaps reached the superstardom that he was begging for on the plane back in Ocean’s Twelve.But the new movie still plays things like he’s stalled at the cusp, and it doesn’t quite come off.Remember when Conan O’Brien first got his talk show, and he’d make jokes about what a nobody he was?It was very funny.Then Conan got very popular, and he was still making those jokes, and it didn’t work, and for a few seasons those jokes were sprinkled awkwardly throughout many of his shows.He’s since gotten over it, but it’s the same kind of problem that infects Ocean’s Thirteen, so it comes up short.Soderbergh will probably continue to come up short of a masterpiece. But there wouldn’t be such fascinating tension in his work if he ever figured out how to pull one off.

March 15, 2007

If you’ve ever gotten into an argument over whether a movie is immoral, you probably understand that the question of movie morality is unmanageable.Accusing movies of amorality crates in a complicated set of assumptions about morality and how a movie should function. The whole mess inevitably melts into something too simplified to make for meaningful debate.Discussions about whether a movie is moral (or political, or racist, or misogynist) usually devolve into quibbles over artistic intent, which is a dead end way of interpreting art, one that reduces any work to the conscious machinations of one simple mortal, the director.The value of differing interpretations falls by the wayside. Better, I’ve learned, to leave the moral question at the door when you enter the cinema, that church of the unholy.

But during the second murder scene in David Fincher’s Zodiac, a picnicker’s body is hoisted half off the grass so that his torso points towards the camera as it is punctured many times over by a masked murderer.It comes across (at first) as painfully realistic, enough for it to seem unconscionable.Greater than the shock of the scene was my surprise at hearing myself wonder, “Holy Christ, is this moral?”

I have never had a thought like this during a movie.But during this scene in Zodiac, it was not just a vague notion flitting around at the back of my mind, but a fully formed question that I wanted answered.In other words, when I flinched at Fincher, I had a unique response; for this reason, the movie secured its place for me as a singular film.

But why was I reacting this way?Probably because the scene works so well:it begins with a couple having a picnic and pleasant chit-chat. It’s idyllic but distant.Cinematographer Harris Savides is a master of cold compositions, even in the warm light of this scene.He shot Gus van Sant’s young death trilogy (Gerry, Elephant, and Last Days), films that are unimaginable without Savides’ immaculate compositions, which keep a distance from their characters, leaving them to their fate.But Savides’ distance gets a little nasty when it’s coupled with the way Zodiac sneers at its doomed couple by the pond.When the woman tells her beau that a man is watching them – the man we know is about to murder them – he replies, “Well, we are very good-looking.”It’s as though the movie sentences him to death by putting the words in his mouth.His ego will be his demise.Sure enough, while the Zodiac killer orders the couple around before he attacks them, his victim is smug and condescending.When the killer straddles him, and moves his body towards the camera, giving us a privileged angle on the multiple stabbings, it’s a very deliberate, apparatus-conscious move.Savides’ distance is suddenly collapsed – I couldn’t help feel complicit in the killer’s actions because he (the killer) had just included me in them.

The invocation of complicity dovetails nicely with a scene in which two detectives retrace the murder of a cabbie, with Mark Ruffalo referring to himself in the first person as the killer and Anthony Edwards playing along.“Why do you open the passenger side door instead of reaching over the backseat?” asks Edwards.“Because I’m an idiot,” says Ruffalo.“But you’re not an idiot,” answers Edwards.It’s fitting that Ruffalo’s character doesn’t hesitate to adopt responsibility for the crime by proxy.He will develop an obsessive fascination with the murders, and the little role-play implies that his obsession is inborn, not obligatory.His very technique, at its inception, is to pretend to be the perpetrator.It’s been said that great cops are able to think like their suspects, and Ruffalo’s character takes this literally.Ruffalo’s detective plays the role of the killer with pleasure.This guy’s practically inviting the obsession that will soon cramp his personal life for the coming decade.Zodiac, for the rest of its three-hour duration, is about this obsession as it consumes not only Ruffalo’s cop, but Robert Downey, Jr.’s investigative journalist, and Jake Gyllehall boyscount-turned-political cartoonist.

Maybe the feeling of complicity explains obsession.My unwitting involvement in the grotesque picnic murder certainly had something to do with my willingness to watch three men track the killer in the daringly uneventful two and half hours that makes up the rest of Zodiac.How much of my zeal for the investigation was motivated by guilt over my participation in the picnic murder?I was willing to wait through a long stretch to find out.

Not everyone is so willing.While I shared the palatial upstairs theater at the City Cinemas on 12th Street with only five other people at a noon screening of Zodiac, a friend of mine braved a Times Square midnight show, where he said people cheered the murders but grew restless during the police procedural of the rest of the movie, and started milling about in the aisles, talking to each other across the expanse of the theater.

While it’s unkind to ruin the movie for more patient patrons, it’s fair to be bored during Zodiac.Most of its conflict doesn’t come from suspenseful escapes or pursuits but the frustrating complications of law enforcement bureaucracy.There’s also a bit of tension between the cops and the investigative journalist competing to solve the case, but because neither of them get very far, the energy of that relationship is sapped before long.Some scenes contain so much discussion of how to get permission from whom to do what that it’s better to let the confident performances fill in for your loss of confidence that you’re sure what’s going on.The couple I saw Zodiac with kindly described it as a movie it would be nice to watch on video while you’re sick, falling in and out of sleep, surrendering yourself to the confusion, rewinding occasionally to see if you missed anything.

Of course, this says nothing about why the multitudes at the AMC 25 in Times Square were applauding the murders.Thinking about that scares me.Perhaps if they had been less restless during the scenes that followed, they would have been intrigued by the way Zodiac deals with viewer involvement.It dares to test our involvement and tease it along during a brutal opening so that it may give way to patience.The tactic is reminiscent of History of Violence, but unlike that film, Zodiac contains no third act terror, no cathartic violence or obligatory climax.In fact, it doesn’t come to much at all, which is fine.Better it play with our involvement and let us wonder about it than tie it up too neatly.And, unlike this viewer, Zodiac never tries to moralize.Seems it was smart enough to leave that kind of thing at the door.

February 23, 2007

Blume in Love, Paul Mazursky’s 1973 divorce comedy, has finally been released on DVD, and the ending is different now than it was then.All the scenes are the same, but the happy ending that Blume in Love must have thought it had 34 years ago has since transformed into an ambiguous final act. The simplistic forgiveness the film feels for its eponymous protagonist has evaporated.It doesn’t go over, and the film is better for it now.

The whole movie hangs on its affectionate portrait of Blume, played perfectly by George Segal.Blume seems like an okay guy: he’s got a cool beard, he’d be pleasant company at a Lakers game, and he’ll loan you the latest Updike.But he’s having some trouble lately.He cheated on Nina, his wife.She left him, and now he’s miserable.

Blume in Love is a portrait of the midlife crisis that ensues after his divorce, and it’s painted in a mellow shade.The movie casually observes Blume as he tries to win back his wife, something he has trouble being casual about. Not that he wouldn’t like to play it cool: like Bob, Carol, Ted, and Alice in Mazursky’s first film, Blume’s a square who feels obligated to embrace the laid back ethos of the time, but he’s tripping over himself trying to be hip, which probably explains the beard.

Impeccably integrated flashbacks starring a clean-shaven Segal reveal that Blume’s beard is a post-breakup affectation, an attempt to be more like Nina’s new fling, Elmo (played with laconic charm by Kris Kristofferson, whose lack of neuroses only serves to highlight Blume’s).The flashbacks give the film a fragmented feel, appropriate given that it’s about divorce; furthermore, the structure puts us in Blume’s court, as we’re trying to piece his life together at the same time he is.This is especially important, as it means the movie itself (not just its characters) are coaxing us to see things from Blume’s P.O.V., and – as we’ll see – siding with him will get troublesome.

Blume’s beard – look at me, I’m different now, I don’t need her – isn’t his only coping mechanism. He also lazes about in Venice – where he and Nina honeymooned – feeling sorry for himself, pontificating in voiceover about the difficulties of love and loss.“I have to have her back,” muses Blume.“If I do not have her back, I will die.I do not want to die.Therefore, I have to have her back.”From conversation, I’ve found out that this line is pitiful to some, hilarious to others, but it’s important in both ways because it gives you the feeling that the movie feels just as sorry for Blume as he does.This is all fine, because in exhibiting all this effrontery, Segal is so charming.His deliberate pluck – look at me, I’m happy, come back to me – gives youthful confidence to a decidedly grown up trauma like divorce.Segal demonstrates the ever-elusive entity of adulthood. He’s perfect as Blume, and that’s why through this study of stunted growth and manipulative maneuvers, he remains so damn likeable.But the charm doubles back on itself when, in Act III, he stops by Nina’s pad, pours himself a stiff drink, and rapes her.

It’s a jolting interlude, due in no small part to the fact that it’s treated as little more than an interlude.The scene gets downright nasty by the time it’s over, showing Nina licking her lips in close-up, insinuating that she’s enjoying it.And the movie trips over itself to excuse Blume from culpability for the awful act: is an insert of him fumbling with the ice cubes right before the act a clumsy attempt to show that he’s drunk and not responsible for what he’s about to do?Or – perhaps more disturbingly— is Blume steeling himself for a deliberate, extremely misguided last-ditch effort to get her back by force?Any way you read it, the movie’s taken a tough turn.

What’s fascinating and troubling is the way that Blume chugs along after the scene, practically ignoring it.I wasn’t around in 1973, but I’m going to venture that the movie got away with the rape scene, at least to a greater extent than it does now.One imdb user who was around in 1973 was reviled upon re-watching it.But why didn’t she react that way before?And why didn’t Roger Ebert so much as mention the rape in his review, even though he covered the scene?

It seems that in the context of the times, it was a forgivable act.But today, the scene throws a disarming kink into the theretofore pleasant proceedings, putting everything that happens afterwards up to close contemporary scrutiny.If it weren’t enough that the scene disrupts our friendly relationship with Blume, the movie proceeds to shoot for a happy ending, which makes things all the more complicated.And I’ll bet that in 1973, Blume in Love got away with its happy ending – Blume and Nina reunited in Venice, planning to raise the baby that resulted from the rape.But the movie gets away with no such thing in 2007.If the scene’s questionable, perhaps casual attitude towards rape doesn’t shut contemporary viewers out completely, it gives way to a final act that’s got plenty to say about its characters, and gets counterintuitively clear about its own ambiguity.

I decided to write about Blume in Love when the friend who initially recommended it to me ten years ago emailed to ask if I’d watched the recently released DVD. “I'm not sure if I didn't actually watch the last 40 minutes of the film the first time I saw it,” he wrote, “or if I willfully forgot it.”He said that Mazursky treats the rape as “the equivalent of ruining dinner” and then “they have a baby, so it’s all good.The happy ending,” my friend said, “is not only sick logic, but a total copout.”

In a way, he’s right.It’s cringe-inducing to think that Mazursky thought his film had a happy ending.But in fact – at least today – Blume has a complicated ending.Our sense of affection for Blume gets dark during the rape scene, one that – to be fair – doesn’t rush things once they get uncomfortable.His actions are believable, as is his likeable performance in the rest of the film.How can these two things coexist?At the time of the film, perhaps they were allowed to coexist because the general mindset about rape – especially the marital variety – was so different.But today we have to ask ourselves how much we’re willing to let Blume (and Blume) get away with.Today, it’s not all good simply because they have a baby.

The rape scene is lodged into the story as a deux ex machina that’s supposed to get Blume low enough so that he can hoist himself back up, and – like it or not – lift Nina up with him. As troubling and misogynist as Mazursky’s treatment of rape is, his major sin is against the artfulness of Blume in Love:he takes this mood piece played in a minor key and imports into it something as tragic, terrifying, and drastic as rape as a convenient device.Still, despite its obliviousness to its own complications, the movie wins out from tonal juxtaposition.It sinks so deeply into its own rhythms – timed to Segal’s effortless performance – that the clash between its loping beat and jolting revelation makes the final act intriguing.

The finale of the Venice reunion today reads as strange, a little perverse, sneakily (and importantly) dark. Blume and Nina traipse off to the same place they honeymooned in, the same place in which he pitied himself unapologetically after their messy, ugly, sometimes childish breakup.Their happiness verges on dim-witted, and it hints that Blume never realizes he's done anything wrong: returning to the place he was so blatantly indulgent and self-pitying so that he can celebrate a new start is questionable at least.

The Venice conclusion is masquerading as a simplistic ending, and today feels like an outgrowth of what the movie's implying for a lot of its run time: it takes some blinders to love, some dumb luck to make it through middle age, and some willed ignorance to avoid imploding from the realization that things don't get easier when you're older.You never feel that much wiser, and that when something hurts, it just hurts, and that's all you know about it. When it feels good, it feels good, and that’s all you care about.Unfortunately, the movie treats the rape that way – it hurts her at first, then it feels good – but the movie’s troubling relationship with its most pivotal scene doesn't ruin the movie as much as complicate it, and makes you wonder just how likeable that bushy beard makes Blume.

February 06, 2007

Your excuses for not having seen Regular Lovers yet are wearing thin.It’s in the third week of a generous run at Cinema Village, and you can’t tell me that since then you haven’t killed the three hours of this film’s duration doing something perfectly useless instead of seeing this, Philippe Garrel’s lovely portrait of would-be revolutionaries in 1968 Paris. It’s been frigid in New York this week so you weren’t distracted from moviegoing by any lovely days.Furthermore, Regular Lovers is a retro-romantic Art Film starring pretty people and shot in black and white, so there’s no saying that you couldn’t take a date to it.You’d be sure to be holding hands by the third hour, and for chrissakes it’s got Lovers in the title.

So what about the other word in the title?“Regular,” that deceptive descriptive that hints at some normalcy we all agree about without understanding.Well, it’s the movie’s approach to the notion of regular life that makes it so beautiful.Garrel manages to take this adjective that is more effective as an assignation of mediocrity than as an indication of quotidian pleasure and spin a long prose poem in its honor.Regular Lovers goes after the essence of what’s rapturous about regularity by following François, a twenty-ish poet afraid to publish because it would be betraying something, even though he’s not sure what that something is. François’ self-imposed dilemma describes the youthful angst of feeling split between earnest ambition (being a poet) and rejecting something that you haven’t quite grasped (vague political devotion, resistance to publishing).

This same split plays out aesthetically in the centerpiece of Act I, a languorous depiction of a May ’68 bohemians-versus-cops riot.Garrel adopts a forcefully elusive tactic, especially ambiguous for a movie that will get so intimate.After some introductory lazing about with his young Parisian poets and painters, Garrel gets them into some trouble at the riot.The structure of the scene is strange, and the violence is dreamy, but the slipperiness of Lovers’ beginning is more rapturous than confusing.(One friend said that without the time and place signifiers, it would look like an alien invasion.)Longhairs in blazers camp behind embankments.It’s fashion photo shoot as political movement, teasing out an awkward relationship between these pretty little things and their anarchist hell-raising.In a hash-induced nod-out, one of them wakes up in darkness, alone in the deserted war zone.Sirens whir mournfully in the distance, and mysterious fires cast strange shadows.A repeated shot of riot-geared cops firing a canon over the camera is spatially disruptive, putting the authorities and the students worlds apart.

But how distant are the cops from the kids?One of the councilmen who hears a case about François dodging military service says that “all the Baudelaires and Rimbauds should be put in prison,” but later on, an officer serves a notice of overdue fines to François’ friend (a trust fund kid who hosts the coterie of misfits), and he inspects the apartment’s paintings rather than the apartment itself.His suspicions are so low that the boys shouldn’t have flushed their contraband when he knocked.

Moving from a laughably fascistic councilman who wants to lock up all artists to the affable and art-appreciating officer reflects the main movement of Regular Lovers as it ambles its way from tumult of the times to tremors of the heart with the same loping gate as its denizens.A police officer opining over the art adorning the walls of these self-made criminals makes for funny banter, especially given all the anti-authority posing on the part of the artist-combatants.The scene underlines that the bohemian boys’ brick-throwing is more an artful embracing of the zeitgeist than it is truly dangerous revolutionary activity.

Lovers – both the movie and its characters – would rather talk about painting than the proletariat, and this scene is a reminder in the meandering, trance-inducing reverie of the moviethat a sense of humor wins out over arty pontificating or political proselytizing.As the film probes this prospect, the characters start to realize it, and neither seems capable of the conclusion without the other.While Garrel is sending in the friendly officer so that his characters might learn something about themselves, it doesn’t seem he could have done it without them starting to get there on their own.

The political demonstrations fade to the background midway through the film, as characters spend more time napping and chatting than marching or rioting.When Lilie steps into the picture, things get reorganized around her (and rightly so – she is loveliness personified) and the affair she has with François.It’s through her that we see François’ misgivings about the freedom of his changing times: he does not want Lilie to sleep around, but permits her a tryst because she asks politely.When she returns to him – he hasn’t budged since she left – he is as relieved as he is in love, and every moment of her absence was certainly agony.But in the same way that François does not want to publish due to some undefined spirit of resistance, his relationship with Lilie resists full devotion, even when they try to promise each other their lives.

So what is more regular, relationships or riots?The stagy distance of the camera and choreography of the protest in Act I give the goings-on an otherworldliness, but also a feeling that someone here is playing pretend – and it’s probably the cops, Garrel, and his characters.In a word, everyone.But at a party, a good bit later in the film, as the kids dance to the Kinks, everything is loose.It’s the only great scene of spontaneous dancing in any movie I’ve seen, collapsing the distance between film and filmed.(How often do you really wish you were at the parties you see in movies?)Here, the movie and its subjects let their guard down, and nobody’s playing pretend.

It’s not that the “regular” of the title would imply that it’s more normal to dance than demolish, but that there is just as much charge and life in growing close to someone as there is in changing the world.The movie is more interested in people’s little interactions than it is the political climate.When he moves from 1968, that landmark year of protest, into ’69, Garrel seems relieved, and starts to try harder to make concrete the feelings that François and Lilie feel for each other.While Regular Lovers doesn’t revise the template of the Angsty and Artsy French Film (these lovers are as doomed as they are regular), it hangs on heartily to the realities of romantic love.François has a great opportunity in Garrel’s hopeful vision of amorous devotion, more than he does in the questionable rebellion against an ineffable force – that which would have him publish would have him try, which would let him love.

The remarkable thing is that Garrel nails it, and without any sermonizing.He loves François (which might be why he cast his son), and doesn’t paint his problematic disposition as posturing, but as a vibrant incarnation of the personal and political complications that make life and youth robust and commanding.He wants the best for François, which is why he gives him Lilie.And, in a demonstrative show of respect, he lets François take her or leave her.

January 25, 2007

The Death of Mr. Lazarescu is screening sporadically at the IFC Center through next week. (It's also available on DVD - for my take on the hierarchy of viewing formats, see the Lazarescu entry on my Top Ten list below.)

Also screening soon is the magnificent Pedro Costa movie Colossal Youth, at Walter Reade on Friday, February 16 at 6:15 and Sunday, February 18 at 1:30. Prioritize this, as Costa's movies don't show up stateside too often.

Colossal Youth is part of the Film Comment Selects series, which offers its typical array of solid and varied fare from around the world. Kudos to Film Comment and Lincoln Center for giving some screen time to stuff that didn't make it to commercial screens last year.

January 24, 2007

Death threats are being doled out to anyone divulging the denouement of Rialto Pictures’ re-release of the 1962 Italian comedy Mafioso.A.O. Scott at The New York Times warns us that the distributor “has promised to fit any critic who reveals too much of the plot with a pair of cement shoes.” Anthony Lane at The New Yorker is playing it safe as well, writing, “If you give [the end] away, the Don will not be happy.”

So, to begin at the beginning: Nino, a dignified factory foreman saunters down the floor of his work place.The walk carries history: it’s confident but a little self-conscious, possessing the kind of showiness that’s covering something up.It’s clear from his gait that Nino wasn’t born into a position authority, but he’s fond of what he’s fashioned himself into.

With his self-conscious strut, Nino isn’t covering up a criminal past, but a small town background.He doesn’t want anyone to know he’s not a city boy.Not that he’d ever say as much; he’s too smooth for that.He’s a cool boss, he’d be proud to say, stopping to tell a laborer not to rush his work, but to find a more relaxed rhythm with his monotonous hole-punching.After this advice, Nino pays a visit to his boss, where we learn he’s about to take his family on a vacation to his hometown in Sicily.Here, he is to hand-deliver a letter to Don Vincenzo.And as we know, in a movie about the Mafia, Don ain’t short for Donald.

But then, 1962 audiences may not have been so wise to this.Rialto Pictures told me in an email that Mafioso “is the first major Italian movie to deal with the Mafia so openly and in such a direct way. This was a big deal when the movie first came out in 1962 in Italy.”To fully comprehend the suspense of the movie, you have to transport yourself back quite a bit, and see that there would have been a lot more mystery about the portentousness of doing a favor for the Don.Much of the audience would be wondering, like Nino’s wife, “Who is this Don Vincenzo?”

Coasting on the built-in suspense of the Mafia mystery, director Alberto Lattuada spends time hanging out with Nino’s family, on the Sicilian beaches, and at the markets, covering lots of character business.And a busy movie it is.In an opening scene, Lattuada makes a fun game of seeing how many modern conveniences Nino can use simultaneously: he shaves with an electric razor while polishing his shoes with a buzzing buffer, shouting over both to converse with his wife.(It’s an old gag, the man-and-his-modern-toys bit, familiar from Modern Times, Playtime, and Bananas.)

Later, on the trip to Sicily, Lattuada makes a study of Nino’s family, and the clash between his self-styled cosmopolitanism and the Sicilian clan’s old-fashioned customs, giving us plenty of material to mull over without getting to the Mafia stuff of Mafioso.The tension between modernity and Sicilian folkways provides conflict and structure to the stuff that takes place between Nino and his family, and makes for something to pay attention to while Nino is slowly recruited by the Don’s henchmen.The trip to Sicily, partly by boat is – like Nino’s errand for the Don at the end of the movie – “both short and long.”While Nino points out the phone lines that now supposedly conjoin Sicily to mainland Italy, the brief boat trip has traversed tons of time.Nino’s electric gadgets would probably look as strange to his Sicilian family as an iPod.

The high energy pulses through most of Mafioso: a rooftop lunch is packed with the gestations and gesticulations of Nino’s relatives, the sound and compositions dense enough to register how hard the bottom falls out when Nino’s wife pulls out a cigarette – not an acceptable habit for a lady in this family – and everyone goes quiet.Even towards the end of the movie, when the goings get serious and Nino’s in the back seat of a car flanked by two stoic goons, things don’t drag.Nino’s fellow passengers steal the somber scene with facial twitches and humorous sidelong looks.

As Phillip Lopate pointed out in Film Comment, this is a “pre-Godfather, unromantic treatment of the mob,” but still, there’s something suspicious about a movie for which the surprise ending is so damned important.All the business with the crowded frames and quirky family members (including a running gag involving a young lady’s mustache) starts to feel more like trimming than substance.Some critics’ take on Mafioso is that it is mocking Nino, criticizing his urbanity or quasi-sophistication.But I don’t buy it.Alberto Sordi plays Nino far too lovingly for the movie to be a critique of his character.

Sure, the gradual build-up to the secret ending was more mysterious in the pre-Godfather days mentioned by Lopate, when audiences weren’t so familiar with the Italian crime syndicate and its limitless grasp.But that tension hasn’t aged so well in 45 years.Admittedly, there is an exhilarating moment when the movie transitions from confinement to spaciousness as a convertible roof is retracted shortly after a medium-long take inside a black box.It’s exciting because Lattuada treats the whooshing verticals of the city’s towering buildings as images of intoxicating freedom.In a movie that comes close to critiquing cosmopolitanism, amorous images of urbanity are fascinating.The excitement of the city almost distracts Nino from what he’s about to do, and we’re reminded that Mafioso isn’t about the politics of progress but about a man.But that’s near the end, and I’m not supposed to write about that.

January 10, 2007

The realism and power of 13 Tzameti comes less from execution than it does from conceit: after a dreamy opening act shot in the shadows of what will be the film’s fatalism, an anonymous young man ends up in a deadly game of roundtable roulette in which the contestants stand in a circle and point loaded guns at the back of one another’s heads while gamblers place high stakes on their player’s arbitrary survival.The sweat looks real, and the cartoon grimaces formed between the jowls of the bloodthirsty gamblers gather a terrifying immediacy.Somehow, it doesn’t seem so far-fetched that in the crannies of our society of competition and greed, something so dastardly might go down.

9. Wassup Rockers,Larry Clark

There’s some daring patience-testing squirming around in Wassup Rockers.The Michael Snow moment happens as the gang picks a set of concrete steps to skate and a belligerent camera stays still for one dull bust after another.You might start thinking the repetition of failure after failure is set-up for a slick, cathartic landing, a mini-climax that rewards you for suffering the sloppy skating.But that’s just predilection for pay-off, and Rockers affords you no such bourgeois indulgences.

A sequence in which one of the Rockers, Kiko, is given a bubble bath by a bourboned-up walking boob job celebrates Kiko’s amorous designs and spits Buñuelian bile at the privileged class.In fact, the scene manages to outdo Luis when a cackling Clark electrocutes the rich bitch in a bathtub.No discreet charm about this bourgeoisie; I don’t think Buñuel would have ever willfully executed Delphine Seyrig.

8. Volver,Pedro Almodóvar

Almodóvar finally catches up with his reputation in this freewheeling character study. He and Penélope Cruz slowly reveal a complicated and troubled woman in Raimunda, but only after winning the audience’s amorous devotion to her.It is a great experience to love a real person, we learn from Volver, not the idealized image we invent on first blush.Not only are Raimunda’s troubling complexities unveiled, but by the end, Cruz has stepped entirely out of the simplistic pretty girl performances she’s put forth in the past.

7. Manderlay, Lars von Trier

After taking on democracy in Dogville, Papa Lars sets his crosshairs on emancipation.He effectively – and to great effect – accuses white America of inventing an idea of freedom that it finds palatable for blacks in hopes that they free themselves into our hands so that we may convince them the shackles we’ve given them are now their own.This is von Trier at his ugliest, and therefore his best.This criminally underseen film opened the year that would belong to Borat, but beat it to many of its assertions.(That is, as I understand it… I haven’t seen Borat.)

6. Mutual Appreciation, Andrew Bujalski

A film that is lovely for its intimacy, that has a honed eye on little bits of human behavior.It faced some undeserved backlash for being small in scope, but the way Bujalski embraces such small scale rather than chase big budget success (as he surely could have done after his award-winning debut) is what makes him and his film so admirable.

5. The Departed, Martin Scorsese

Swings from thugs to snitches, crime syndicates to elaborate bureaucratic busts, from Rolling Stones bodega beatdowns to a diabolical deluge of do-ins in which demises are doled out on the down beat.The staged executions of this work of pure fiction are tougher to stomach than the troublingly omni-viewed offing of Saddam.Last year, the throat-slit in Caché elicited a gasp from every audience that sat for it, and this year nauseous groans emit from every Departed audience.But this time it’s men in the audience who can’t take it, maybe because Marty’s flipped the cinema of joyous violence he helped invent for them on its back, laying it out like so many extras and superstars littering the elevator landing with equalizing inertia.

Watching Leo and Damon meta-fictionally square off for the top spot brought the greatest Hollywood moment of the year, and the peak political moment of pop culture blew through when Baldwin bellowed “Patriot Act!Patriot Act!” illustrating the termitic results of carte blanche bugging that doesn’t have a tick turd’s worth to do with terrorism.

4. Colossal Youth, Pedro Costas

This contemplative story centers on Ventura, a lean, dark tower of a man who plays spiritual father to the emotional orphans of a housing development in the throes of renovation.His visits with the tenants are defined primarily by their studious tenderness – long, static shots, the compositions and lighting varying – but tinged with bitter reality as a woman who calls him father charges him for the beers he downs at her pad.With a narrative that leaps around in time, seems to repeat itself, and might contain a ghost, Costa’s film gathers its unquestionable continuity of character and clarity of heart from its soulfulness and poignancy:as a favor to one of his quasi-adoptees, Ventura composes a love poem off the cuff for the man to send to his estranged wife: “I wish I could give you a hundred thousand cigarettes, a dozen of those fancy dresses, a car, the little lava house you’ve always wanted, a four-penny bouquet.”This is a heartbreaking masterpiece.

3. L’Enfant, Dardenne Brothers

Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men is on plenty of Top 10 lists this year, a movie with stunning action sequences about the tumultuous turn of events triggered by the birth of a single baby.Cuarón’s film is a pristine picture of virtuosity, shooting scenes of elaborate geography in single takes.In one instance of formidable filmmaking, he splashes blood on the lens early on in the take so that later, when we’ve covered much ground and run down the shot clock, the red droplets remind us we’re watching the same shot we were before we came in this room, went down that hallway, came up those steps, got off that bus, came from behind that embankment.Whew.

But the real masterwork with stunning action sequences about the tumultuous turn of events triggered by the birth of a single baby is the Dardenne Brothers’ new film.Cuarón manages to rub some realism on the future with his stylistic decisions, but they still register – blood droplets and all – like stylistic decisions.In L’Enfant, the traveling camera and the terror it captures and communicates is an extension of the realism inherent in the soul of the thing.

2. Death of Mr. Lazarescu, Cristi Puiu

This summer, at a Walter Reade screening of Rules of the Game, after I’d uncorked a bottle of Shiraz and filled a plastic deli cup for my gal and I, a balding man with wire-framed glasses shuffled in front of us and plunked down in the adjacent seat.I saw him sizing us up and to my chagrin he ventured an opener:

“Is this your first Renoir picture?”

We snapped back a curt monosyllable in the negative, hoping to cut him off, but he was perversely encouraged by our testiness, and he proceeded to somehow trick me into engaging with him in a dialogue about how young people don’t go to the movies, they watch films as downloads on iPods, they don’t know anything about vinyl, these kids and their digital culture.That he couldn’t tell us he actually knew the habits of any specific person under thirty didn’t deter his diatribe.Before we ditched him with a seat switch, we made a last ditch effort with him:“You know, things change, pal.”

Then – and I almost spit my Shiraz at this development – it turned out this mole had a date!She came down the aisle, spied him in the second row, and made a face – her saved seat was too close for her taste.“You gotta sit up close and let the images wash over you,” he proclaimed to her and every ticket holder on the ground floor.Unconvinced, she tried to persuade him to move.He stood fast.They did not sit together.I’m pretty sure he slept alone.

The queasiness over technological advances (also evidenced recently in The New York Times and The New Yorker) is a small price to pay for our youth having access to knowledge of directors and films (and musicians and artists) they never would have heard of if they were thumbing through the annual Videohound tome the way I was when I was their age.The kids are alright; they’ve got resources these days.

Up with the Internet Movie Database and file-sharing!Renaissance by iPod, anyone?

Of course, there is a hierarchy of viewing, and the Luddite at Rules of the Game was right.“You gotta sit up close.”But, as my companion wondered, “Did he have to say it like that?”

In a Cinemascope interview earlier this year, the director of the Romanian real-timer Lazarescu Cristi Puiu proudly proclaimed himself a member of the DVD generation, having practically forsaken theater-going due to the popcorn and soda culture prevalent at movie venues in his home of Romania (and it’s not much different here – lots of trimmings that make the movies seem modest).Once I may have cringed at finding out that the director of this masterwork favors home viewing over the temple of the movie theater.But then I think of that asshole at Rules of the Game.Things change, pal, and any evolution that brings us Death of Mr. Lazarescu is a sweet one.

1. Miami Vice – Theatrical Version, Michael Mann

A gorgeous monster of the momentary mode of the medium – shot on DV and film, seamlessly interweaving them beneath windswept chaos.A wispy ballet of ballistics and bullets, Mann’s masterpiece is an elastic exercise in treatment of time and place, somehow simultaneously rushing ahead of itself with its self-propelling pace and establishing rapturous intimacy with the places and events that its inhabitants (ciphers or mystics?) speed through with deterministic fatalism.Flopped at the box office and affectionately hair-tussled by critics, probably because nobody knew what the hell they were looking at: a new kind of movie seemingly shot by an alien for the curious eye it casts towards human modes of travel, communication, relationship, and eradication.

December 29, 2006

On Christmas Eve, just north of the holiday bustle of Union Square, my friends and I stocked up on provisions for the three-hour Good Shepherd.After espresso from down the block and a medium popcorn from concessions, we were trying to decide whether to get a Loews hot dog (four bucks, a little less than I’d anticipated) when my lady checked her watch and decided to head in frankfurter free to catch previews.

All of the trailers before The Good Shepherd were about trust.The Hitcher involves a hitchhiker who tells a couple of dumb kids that people shouldn’t find him so trustworthy, after which carnage ensues.Amazing Grace is another installment in the Trust Whitey tradition of Amistad, about a Parliament man who deigns to bare the onus of helping slaves from his ivory throne.(God forbid Hollywood generate a biopic about Harriet Tubman or Nat Turner – you know, a movie about emancipation starring a black person.)After Don’t Trust Hitchhikers and Trust Whitey was the Who Can You Trust? trailer for Breach, in which the word “trust” must have been uttered at least a dozen times.All this was before The Good Shepherd, a Don’t Trust Anyone movie.

When I console myself for still being an amateur blogger and not a paid critic, I take comfort in the fact that if I were attending press screenings, I’d be missing out on previews.If I’m wrong, don’t tell me – it’s an effective consolation, as I love big screen trailers, and imagine I’ll miss them plenty when I’m indulging in the same kind of lavish mansion and a yacht lifestyle as the likes of J. Hoberman or A.O. Scott.

Months ago, a preview effectively brought us to The Good Shepherd, announcing itself before The Departed.In the past year, other previews for December prestige pictures haven’t been very impressive.When we saw Lady in the Water, a friend and I elbowed each other vigorously, sniggering over the self-important trailer for Children of Men.Sneak peeks at Flags of our Fathers and Letters From Iwo Jima were too steely to get me stoked.Arriving with much less self-inflation and bravado was trailer for The Good Shepherd, which offered an attractive compromise: sit through a slow-paced Oscar bid directed by an actor in exchange for the chance to watch Matt Damon, eternal post-adolescent, carry a three hour movie in which he’d play the title role.

For a few years now, I have fostered a strong affinity for the work of Matt Damon.With passable good looks and eternally nascent adulthood, he embodies an anachronism: charismatic anonymity. He has an everyguy style, an ability to be at home in a big Hollywood movie without seeming entirely part of its glitz and pomp.(As opposed to his sometimes co-star Brad Pitt, who glitzed and pomped up movies before he was the focus of attention.)In Soderbergh’s Ocean’s movies, Damon plays a rookie thief with an exaggerated need to please.Begging to play with the big guys – namely Clooney and Pitt – came off as a self-aware joke on Damon’s own emerging stardom, a gag he pulled off without self-congratulation.His ingénue as self-parody won me over, and my fondness was one that was shortly thereafter legitimized by profiles and reviews that praised him for being one of Hollywood’s few stars who could still disappear into a role.

He does not disappear altogether into his role in The Good Shepherd, but he does hide behind a pair of glasses that get thicker as he ages, which is the film’s only effort at aging him over two decades.For a movie that takes its time, the three-hour Good Shepherd doesn’t do much to create the feel of time actually passing.My hang-up on this aspect of (non)realism would be petty if I didn’t think that Shepherd would benefit from subtler examination of how slowly Damon’s character manages any personal change or perspective.Shifting around in time, from Damon’s days as a poetry student to his first years as an agent, from an early romance to a bitter marriage, from World War II to the Bay of Pigs, Shepherd casually overlaps eras in a way that never coalesces into any synchronicity.Because nothing comes of it, it reads more like a cute device than a rewarding structure, not something organic but imposed after principal photography.Because Damon never looks younger or older, Shepherd starts to look like a time-travel piece in which his character is traipsing around in the fourth dimension, a sci-fi spy who shows up behind the scenes of the major conflicts of the twentieth century.

Of course, Shepherd is less Back to the Future than it is Bond with the brakes on. As a character piece, it has the potential to excel (or at least intrigue), but it instead settles somewhere in a matrix of historical drama, biopic, and espionage thriller, not really pulling out the stops for any of them, creating a Bermuda triangle in which it gets lost.

It’s always frustrating to watch a movie settle for blandness, especially when there are moments when it seems ready to veer off into something fascinating.A Christmas party attended by Santa Claus himself bears all the marks of a readiness for the road to delusion, and for a few minutes it looks like Good Shepherd is getting into gear.The caroling is shot with an alien’s eye, and the pretense towards middle class respectability that the spy wives peddle with their aggressive singing looks more menacing than quaint.And there in the corner is big Bobby D., the paralyzed general, crooning along reluctantly.At the height of the weirdness, Damon’s lad takes a piss on Santa’s lap, in a refrain of an earlier scene in which Damon gets pissed on (yes, literally!) by a secret society frat brother.The first bond between father and son is in the bathroom, as he sympathetically cleans his boy up with the door open, the stigma of a little urine long since compartmentalized.For a man who’s made a life of keeping secrets, he invites the voyeur at odd moments.

Unfortunately, the madness dissipates rapidly, and even the occasional egregiously simplistic symbolism (floating wedding dress as dashed dreams and bride’s death) only peppers the placid proceedings of the rest of the picture.When Michael Gambon, who plays Damon’s mentor, is beaten and thrown into the water, Damon watches his demise, symbolized by his upended floating cane. This unbearably easy imagery as a substitute for more genuine emotiveness is troubling, as a quick shot of Damon’s countenance of inscrutability could have done the job.Still, the moment is silly enough to be enjoyable, and I was hoping that Shepherd was careening towards exaggerated symbology (a la Michael Bay), but it settled back into its drab fascination with its own exposition, saving the scene from something fun and reducing it to a mere plot point.

Last week at Film Forum I saw Jean-Luc Godard’s Two or Three Things I Know About Her.I also watched the new DVD of Adam McKay’s Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby, andI’m having a little trouble keeping them straight.Two or Three Things is a grab bag of scattershot references to all things 1967, a study of people whose lives and psyches are firmly fixed to the mechanisms of capitalism.Talladega Nights is pretty much the same thing, forty years later.In 1967, it was Vietnam and tights designed to look like knee socks; in 2006 it’s Applebee’s and Diane Sawyer.

Of course, there are a few minor differences.While in McKay’s film the plot is negligible, in Godard’s it is nearly nonexistent.Talladega bagged belly laughs at my bedside while Two or Three Things churned up only the occasional chortle from the Forum audience.Ricky Bobby is a whore for corporate America – he is bound by contract to mention Powerade in daily prayer – while the whore of Her is an actual prostitute.But the metaphorical implications of her profession aren’t too thematically distant from those of Ricky Bobby’s.While Talladega insists that Ricky Bobby cannot be truly victorious without dropping his corporate sponsorship, Godard implies that freedom of the individual is unattainable in the grips of capitalism.

Godard once claimed that he would have liked to take the film he made simultaneous with Two or Three Things – the more narrative and amusing Made in U.S.A. – and interweave it with Two or Three Things by alternating reels, from one film to the other, during presentation.I can’t help wonder what content and context overlap would emerge if we were to project Two or Three Things in alternating reels with the more narrative and amusing Talladega Nights.

Combining the films would conflate their seeming differences and illuminate how much they have in common, and how rewarding it is to read a seeming piece of trivial slapstick as a cultural yardstick.So, to stick to my guns:Both films get some laughs out of an actor portraying a character of a different nationality than his own, making a mockery of believable accents.In the Godard film, national identity is reduced to a flag on a t-shirt, in McKay’s, it’s a macchiato and a paperback.It would be lovely to watch the child in Godard’s film recite his dream about North and South Vietnam uniting right before hearing Ricky Bobby’s kid claim that Washington, D.C. is the capital of his home state of North Carolina.It plays like a silly joke about a stupid kid on its own, but infused with Godard’s subversive sense of humor, it might read more like a statement about political policy forming the center of a child’s psychology in its formative stage. (The line that follows, about pissing his peepants, however, would still play like pure McKay).

Both films deal in semantics, and some dynamite could be found in intercutting the two films’ concerns with words as arbiters of thought.If only the tender interaction in which Godard’s heroine tells her son that “language is the house man lives in” could be followed by McKay’s lengthy scene centered around word choice during prayer.When Ricky Bobby disagrees with his wife over whether he may pray to an infant Jesus (“Christmas Jesus,” as he hilariously christens his deity), he begins a comical roundtable discussion on whether an immortal savior has a fixed age or image as an omnipotent spirit.Ricky Bobby has transplanted the commonly uttered phrase “baby Jesus” from the spoken to the thought, and now he is defending the image the words have formed in his mind as though it was a conscious decisions on his part, which he probably thinks it is.His wife’s dismissive accusation that he’s being stupid is an attempt to circumvent Ricky’s more analytical (if flawed) perspective on prayer. If we got lucky and the reels matched up right, we’d properly punctuate this scene with one of the lines spoken to the audience in Two or Three Things: “we often try to analyze the meaning of words but are led astray.One must admit that there’s nothing simpler than taking things for granted.”

The most striking similarity between these two films is the way they deal with contemporary symbology.The interiors of Two or Three Things are cluttered with logos on boxes and posters – there’s a perverse pleasure in how indistinguishable advertisement becomes from décor.What marvelous synthesis would be had between Godard’s image of a modern kitchen as a soap advertisement with Talladega’s pan over a dinner table of logos and corporate packaging.One chapter heading in Two or Three Things is “Symbology of Forms.”Underlining how pervasive commercial labeling is, Godard offers the title as a sort of book cover, yet another commercial image cluttering the composition.A direct line could be drawn from Paris to Charlotte if we then jumped to the shot in Talladega in which Ricky Bobby is literally blinded by corporate agitprop, a Fig Newtons logo emblazoned across his windshield.Godard’s contemplative fascination with the doldrums of the free market – whether a dress shop will reserve an article of clothing, the sputtering of draft beer, a straight-faced presentation of a day care doubling as a brothel – would be energized by McKay’s fantastical broad brushstrokes.

Talladega is a reflection of how all-encompassing commercialism, slogans, and logos are in contemporary society. The NASCAR environs – with nonstop signage and billboard apparel – make advertisement seem as much a part of our everyday lives as Godard seemed to be prophesying it might become when he made Two or Three Things.Of course, as part of the Hollywood machinery, Talladega is shilling these products more than employing them for Marxist deconstruction, but the effect would be undeniable in a Godard-McKay mash-up.

Sure, McKay isn’t tracing the contours of human psychology being shaped by commercial imagery.And rather than serving as an investigation into the “symbology of forms,” his references to The Lion King, Bennigan’s, and Coca-Cola are more fodder for the joke-per-minute ethos of the film than they are signifiers of contemporary zeitgeist.In Two or Three Things, the war in Vietnam is name-checked alongside a magazine article about knee socks in a spectacular moment of reportage of mass murder flattened into pop culture dispatch.Unfortunately (save for an easy joke about Halliburton) the war in Iraq is conspicuously absent from Talladega, even though working class NASCAR fans are likely to have close family members fighting this war fought on a lie.

In the end, Talladega is less an extension of Two or Three Things than it is guilty of an accusation Godard throws at government in his film, in that “through the mask of modernism” it is “regularizing the natural tendencies of capitalism.”Still, a movie that posits that the U.S. has offered the world nothing more than George Bush, the Thighmaster, and the missionary position would play well if we were chuckling at its goofy gaffs as though they were Godardian gags.

November 30, 2006

I often use these (semi-)weekly write-ups to discuss – almost exclusively – what I find intriguing about the form of a film, avoiding discussion of plot, acting, or narrative. The Naked Spur piece was really about the square frame.The only way I could find to interact with Sweetie was via its language of cuts and spatial relationships.Comparing Larry Clark to Michael Snow in the Wassup Rockers piece may have been pushing it, but I was refreshed and impressed by the formalism of a film that seemed at first glance to be so loosey-goosey. And last week, I may have been asking too much of Casino Royale when I hoped for its central poker scene to play the way Chantal Akerman would have shot it.

But a pleasant surprise occurred at the Kips Bay theater last week when I saw Déjà Vu, a film for which (arguably) expectations should not rise too high.While Tony Scott’s latest lark doesn’t exactly go after any subversive challenging of audience expectation, it has a fascinating way of playing with its own devices.While some critics are impressed solely by its surprising central conceit – it drops time travel into its conventional thriller narrative with blustering gusto – the often deft handling of the narrative and its relationship to Scott’s bombastic aesthetic brings the film close to achieving an integrated use of the medium, the kind I’ve been trying to detect in movies as varied as Miami Vice and A Nos Amours.

Part II: A Locust Swarm of Cameras Gives Way to Fascinating Details

We know from the preview, the poster, and the name of the director that shortly after we sit down for Déjà Vu, something is going to blow up.The feeling of imminence accelerates as hundreds of extras gather to board a ferry, all of them acting too anonymously not to be cadavers after the opening credits.The post-Katrina New Orleans setting is pushed to the fore to give the film a readymade feeling of immediacy. To gain more of the currency of feeling current, Navy boys are boarding, evoking the audience’s fervent (if also uneasy) support of our young troops as of late. It’s an effective cinema synecdoche, as a small piece of the culture – a Hollywood action-thriller – starts to represent something huge about the culture: our nascent sense of vulnerability to nature and terrorists.

Talk about coverage: a routine march onto a little bitty boat swirls, slows, and stomps from as many angles as the studio had cameras (and helicopters), presenting the procession of faceless prey onto the sea vessel from as many angles as possible.It’s Hollywood convention but also an energetic patchwork of disparate sounds and images, played at different speeds with deep contrast and saturation, that has its own kind of elegance when executed by director Scott, one of the style’s originators.

Sure enough, the boat blows up.In the wake of the wreckage, Denzel Washington arrives and suddenly all the cameras know where to turn.Washington’s formidable presence is not as much buttressed by admiring lenses as heightened into stratospheres of universal importance by the way Scott shoots the suave savior of the scene.Again, something huge and intangible (disaster and its meaning) is transformed into something concrete and immediate as Scott uses the same semi-circle swirls to orbit Denzel as he did the catastrophic explosion that blew all the extras to bits a few minutes previous. And again, the vast is collapsed into minutiae, as the movie turns an admiring eye toward Washington’s attention to tiny details that will help him solve the crime.

In another sort of synecdoche, the plot is put into motion by the relationship of a fragment to a whole: after the explosion, Washington gets wind of a seemingly unrelated incident, the murder of a young woman who was not aboard the boat, that will lead him to the terrorist who had too much of a blast at Mardi Gras. During his initial investigation, in a moment of noteworthy weirdness, Washington puts his finger on the dead woman’s mouth and then puts the finger between his own lips, in a kind of reverse make-out.Shortly thereafter, he’s enlisted into a covert special-ops unit that uses a surveillance system called Snow White, which they claim can render realistic playback of any place they choose at a forward-moving fixed point in time four days previous. It isn’t far into Washington’s first session sitting in that something seems too good, too complete, for Snow White to be mere recorded surveillance.

What they’re really watching is a live, parallel time line that they could reach out to touch and alter if they weren’t terrified of what it would cause.It is here that Déjà Vu – in a bold, unhesitant stroke – rearranges itself around the premise of time travel as investigation. A satisfying scene ensues when Washington figures out that Snow White is not simple surveillance and breaks the fourth wall between the surveyors and the surveyed.Admittedly, the ramifications of his realization are delineated with easy metaphors (time travel is like folding a piece of paper in half), and the technicians argue a Time Travel for Dummies version of their disagreements over the possibilities of their endeavor.However, engaging subtextual commentary comes from the composition.Their debate takes place in front of a screen that displays wall-size blowups of the subjects whose lives they could retroactively alter with their dealings. The images of the past they’re projecting onto the screen dominate the frame, the marionettes dwarfing the puppeteers.The intricacies of the scene of simplistic dialogue are heightened by the visuals, and in this way Scott makes a fine game of pontificating Déjà Vu’s riskier plot points.

In another formalistically integrated scene, standard car chase goes conceptual as Scott finds a way to go split-screen: as Washington races down a freeway, the four-days-ago image plays out alongside the present-time image.But it’s not an imposition of two separate frames, as you might expect, but a kinetic composition that foregrounds a small screen that Washington is using to see the past while the present-moment image takes up the rest of the frame, about the size of half the windshield.

The car chase is maniacal, as Washington’s Hummer barrels down the wrong lane of the busy expressway.He’ll stop at nothing, we’re being told, because he’s taking the case personally.He’s trying to carve a little convenient purpose out of a world he’s finding harder to believe has meaning.It’s explained in shorthand, of course (“somethin’ spiritual”), but his tentative conviction that a small victory might integrate a world view reflects that relationship of fragment to whole that Scott’s aesthetic highlights in the very first scene.Similar is the way that Snow White can rapidly zoom from vast aerial shot of a city to intimate close up of an individual.Déjà Vu plays out along character and narrative axes that mirror and bend to each other, making the picture – even as it devolves into bland “get the bad guy, then the girl” histrionics – one that manages to move forward on a number of levels simultaneously, like the separate strands of time drawn with a Sharpie by one of Snow White’s engineers.And the fact that Washington performed reverse-time make-out with the victim (finger to her lips to his mouth) serves Déjà Vu’sstructural acrobatics.He’ll effectively revive the woman by moving backwards in time the same way he reversed their kiss on the autopsy table, which arranges the emotional plane along the same axis as the time-reversing narrative one.In this way, Déjà Vu starts to look – as you look backwards – like a movie that’s playing with the problems it sets up for itself, even if its conventional simplifying won’t allow it to solve them.

November 22, 2006

Casino Royale sets itself up on a strong foundation, with some genuine cinema in evidence.A pre-credits showdown in an office frames James Bond so far deep and left that he seems to have stolen into the frame the same way he did the bad guy’s office.The first big chase whisks the action forward after the obligatorily elaborate credits sequence.Never mind that Bond’s outfit reads more mall chic than it does typical Bondian macho-suave.It’s more important that right away the filmmaking reminds us that the rules of the game reject laws of physical possibility in favor of kinetic excitement.High-speed climbing and wall-to-wall base-jumping had it looking like the trailer for Spiderman 3 had spread its web into the feature presentation.

The visual language that allows for such abandon is a straightforward one, too self-aware to register as cliché, oftentimes strengthening the vibrato of the action with pristine informational clarity so that no viewer gets lost in the chase.If the heady hallucinations of Miami Vice evoked a French symbolist imagining gunfights, Casino Royale is the one-to-one street verbiage of hip-hop poets.Therefore, cases and cases of cash equal Big Baddie Business, war-torn country equals sinister dealings with guerillas, poker equals high stakes, and mongoose versus snake equals … well, no need for an excuse to have something as fun as mongoose versus snake in your movie.The simplicity provides readymade maneuverability, but can also get a little troubling, as an embassy quickly equals that pesky obstacle to justice known as international diplomacy, and the showdown therein possesses a discomfiting similarity to a Tarzan-like dynamic of Muscle-Bound Whitey versus Big Black Africans.

The point is that things get moving quickly.(And they stay in motion: Bond’s first encounter with Eva Green’s stock Bond Girl is shot on a train, the landscape rushing by as Craig and Green do their best to parlay some flirt-by-numbers dialogue into repartee.)The rush job picks up easy momentum because it gets going before any bland exposition has gotten in the way.The direct simplicity of the visual language, the lack of concern about too much plot, the general feel and swoop of the energetic bits of Casino Royale result from an understanding between audience and film in Bond’s house, and that is If that guy’s Bond, and Bond’s after that guy, Bond’s gotta get that guy.Okay, go. In other words, there are rules.Casino Royale earns its audience’s engagement, even though it probably doesn’t have to.

The contract between Bond movies and their audience is one that’s proven reliable.Besides strict application of complicated statistical analysis assuring the box office accountability of any Bond boy entering the fray anew, Bonds are of good stock, built on the solid foundation of a fiscally formidable franchise and the built-in publicity of guaranteed men’s magazine covers.James Bond takes all the risks; the movies about him avoid anything chancy. (Any bending of the rules is only in above-the-table fun – when Daniel Craig claims not to give a shit if his martini is shaken or stirred, his tongue is lodged so firmly in his cheek he can barely spit out the line.)This is all contingent upon one stipulation.The responsibility of Casino Royale is to be thrilling.Rapid tracking shots of pursuer and pursued racing up an unlikely incline get the job done, as do two swirling helicopter shots of resulting fisticuffs at the summit of the incline.

That said, Casino Royale takes a gamble, and it’s not Craig.After everything’s good and gotten going, we go to Montenegro and the ratcheting of the action goes south.For the first face-off with Villain Numero Uno, cardplay will replace gunplay as Bond takes on the Big Bad Guy, the bigwig who “serves as private banker” to the terrorists of the world, in an extended game of poker.Marathon poker game as centerpiece for freewheeling action movie?Deal me in. This inversion of logic and expectations might make for some provocative proceedings.Adding to the intrigue, there’s Jeffrey Wright, the most perplexing actor in America, lurking at the edge of the poker table the way he did so many of the compositions of Ali.

Suddenly, Casino Royale is redirecting its tracking-shot canvassing, head crunching, and self-propelling plot rapidity to a tabletop, focusing on tics of behavior (“tells,” unintentional betrayals of nervousness), card strategy, and wardrobe decisions.It’s not exactly structuralism among the destruction, but it’s an unbalancing act of reverse kaleidoscoping that rearranges the aesthetic of the action.If the pursuit went perverse, we might get to watch the action glide into real time as hands of cards transpired without edits.Despite the fact that things will be frayed at the edges by cute attempts at comic squabbling between Bond and his lady, would it be too much to ask that Casino Royale go formalist?

Yes.The action is chopped up rather than reveled in, excising most of the small stuff that might make watching poker an observational exercise in the way people play each other, which would be a nice cinematic corollary to Bond’s citation of the gambling adage about playing the man across you, not the cards in your hand.Most egregious is the superfluous play-by-play proffered by Giancarlo Giannini, explaining almost every card toss to Eva Green as an excuse to keep the audience in the know. This game narration is an unforgivable misstep in audience underestimation given the popularity of internet poker, celebrity poker, and an ESPN channel seemingly devoted to nothing but poker. The shots of Giannini explaining things to Green are in simplistic two-shot with no background, I’d bet because they were filmed after principal filming as a safeguard against studio worries about the clarity of the card game dealings.

Here Casino Royale loses grip on the advantages of its direct visual language.A bunch of chips can equal big risk and an ace can equal victory, but everything’s diffused by over-explanation (and, as usual, Wright is wasted in a minor role).Once the movie exits the casino, the clearcut cinematic parlance of the direction goes from direct to deflated.A torture scene takes place in a basement of four anonymous walls, a video game setting.Even the stuff that’s not computer-generated starts to look like it is.The possible dynamism of the torture scene should come from the unusual fact that we’re watching an iconic figure sitting naked in a bottomed-out chair, stripped of ego as well as clothing.But the principle that the scene organizes itself around is based on an assumption about the audience, rather than the simple agreement about action that structured the earlier scenes.Casino Royale decides that rather than give Bond a dressing down, it will champion his machismo.Much the same way it flirts with something structural in the poker centerpiece but shies away in time to be another bland Bond, it’s got enough going for it in the torture basement to be subversive, but cops out in favor of the conventional egoism earlier Bond movies were often parodying.By the time the scene has completely lost itself, and Craig is telling a joke to the villain about his nuts, it’s clear that Casino Royale will not recover from its miscalculations at the poker table.Maybe it’s time to deal Bond out.

November 07, 2006

What does it mean when we say that a director makes personal films?It probably means we are talking about someone like Pedro Almodóvar, who has a distinct, immediately recognizable style, and who works in a familiar framework with characters who – from film to film – belong in the same universe.It means that we are talking about a director who seems to be making films that are an extension of his personality.In that way, Almodóvar surely makes personal films.

A personal note, then:I’ve always felt very distant from Almodóvar and thought his ever-expanding throng of unreserved admirers was undeserved.I have been perplexed by the long lines and rave reviews that greet a new Almodóvar picture.But I am more interested in appreciating this movie than in discussing its faults, because my experience with Volver has led me to believe that the Almodóvarians are onto something.I’d rather point to qualities of this movie as a way of understanding what I may have been missing than detract on a point that I’m sure isn’t worth making to his audience, who can manage such a strong emotional investment in fictional characters. If Almodóvar’s throng of admirers has been having similar experiences with his other characters to the one I had with Raimunda, the protagonist of Volver, it is no wonder that they flock to each of his pictures.I am fascinated and touched by the way Almodóvar and Penélope Cruz unfold the personality – or, I am pressed to say, the soul – of Raimunda.Cruz melds with her working class character, transforming the powerful presence that the actress possesses as a cross-Atlantic superstar into the distinguished air that Raimunda carries with fierce dignity.

A quick examination of the opening scenes of Volver will provide the seed of explanation for what’s worth celebrating in the film.Praise for the opening’s qualities is also praise for the film as a whole, and – generally speaking, I suppose – for Almodóvar’s oeuvre.

The beginning of Volver makes the typical narrative rounds, stopping by all the key locations and introducing all the themes that will be vital to the story.The deliberate drive through the film’s territory is not expository and tedious, but a total joyride.We meet Raimunda, her daughter Irene, and her sister Sole: three key characters introduced, check.They are polishing a grave: morbid hang-ups of characters, check.They leave the cemetery as we learn that the grave Raimunda and Sole were polishing was their mother’s: dead mom, check.Afterwards, they visit their aunt Paula who seems senile when she says their dead mother has been looking after her: crazy character foreshadowing the kooky fashions of the forthcoming narrative, check.After that, they stop by the aunt’s neighbor’s house, at which point we can check off the character who will explain the supernatural aspects of the plot.Already, we have established the workings of the plot that will follow.

And yet the technique of this procession of events is less an aggressive act of transparency than the achievement of an accomplished aesthetic of clarity.Almodóvar rounds each curve with deft handling, carried along by graceful camera movement and his sharp sense of how to shoot expository dialogue, always keeping some character or object of interest out of the shot, giving the camera places to move and charging the frame with flickers of energy just out of sight.As the characters are introduced, the close-to-kitsch cutesiness of reaction shots and pleasant hamming of some of the actors reminds us this is indeed an Almodóvar film (as does every other element), a personal work, which is why he can maintain an effective hold on the stylized performances throughout the film.And it is in this opening cruise that Raimunda emerges as a no-nonsense mom, a sassy sister with sibling superiority, and a thoughtful woman who devotes her Sundays to making all the right stops.

As the opening winds down and night falls on the film, the last item on the checklist comes into view: Raimunda goes home.This is where the aforementioned soul-unfolding starts to go down.She lives in anonymous low income blandness, with a beer-drunk husband who barely greets her.The regal air that Raimunda was allowed without qualification before we went home with her is shot through with the disappointments of her domestic situation, and therefore her life.It’s a shattering scene, all the more so for Almodóvar’s approach: he shoots the marital argument that Raimunda must lower herself to with a casual full shot.He’s not subjecting her to a suddenly indifferent camera, but illustrating (and with remarkable subtlety) how his character is caught amongst clutter that contains her character rather than expresses it.Before she hits the sack, Almodóvar hits back on her behalf, inserting a dishwashing shot that features her supple cleavage (both motherly and seductive) as she sponges off a prominently-sized knife.Her rapid movements with the threatening object make her seem dangerous in this moment, and that knife will undoubtedly return. (Ahem, first part of recurring image: check).

Raimunda will spend the rest of Volver trying to regain that dignity we were allowed to glimpse in the opening scenes.A body count with a tally of two soon boomerangs back from the cemetery scene, and the plot gets underway.The real complexity of Raimunda comes into fuller and fuller view, and it’s kaleidoscopic as it transpires.She covers up a murder, albeit a justified one, and takes over a defunct restaurant without authorization from its off-site owner.She struggles with her precocious daughter, who she doesn’t realize she might be losing to her sister.Her appealing traits blend with her faults:her attractive strength is also her domineering assuredness, which verges on obliviousness and leads to callousness.I might love Raimunda, and digesting the frustrating complications of her character is almost as damnable a duty as the tangled task of letting a real loved one be a complete person, not just the version you’d like to wake up with.

We watch Raimunda go to the toilet.We learn about her past cold-shouldering of her mother and witness her repeat the behavior with her sister.Almodóvar is daring us to wonder whether Raimunda deserves to win back the regal demeanor she radiated when we first met her, before the domestic scene.(It’s worth noting that he avoids the house after it’s served its purpose.)He manages a delicate interaction with both Raimunda and his audience, simultaneously drawing them towards each other.Revelations about her character near the end might drag (and empty the compositions of their initial intrigue, as they go down appropriately enough against the black of night), but it is important to Almodóvar, in this personal picture, to make clear how much love can come from deep pain.

Almodóvar’s portrait takes place via filmic means – by letting his audience observe the external ways in which a character navigates a situation, utilizing the performances around her as much as Cruz’s to execute this incisive character study.He manages to relay an intimate revelation amidst a rambunctious plot that includes a restaurant takeover, a corpse cover-up, a film crew, and a Spanish ghost posing as a Russian hairdresser.This maneuvering displays his virtuosity.That the portrait is so plaintive, and that the passion of the filmmaking comes from such empathetic feelings for so problematic a person is testament to his compassionate cinemaand tender artistry—the rapturous extension of a director who has made a lovely and personal film.

October 20, 2006

If you bother seeing Terry Gilliam’s critically maligned Tideland, you will find yourself struggling to find a way to watch the damn thing. If you’re not going to try to ride the choppy waves of Tideland, don’t stick around for the duration.It’s not worth it.But if you’re an incorrigible optimist in search of a way to get through this episodic nightmare that must be Gilliam’s idea of dream logic, I think I can help.

The Outskirts

The bulk of Tideland follows its little girl protagonist running amok in a field of wheat freaking out on girlish fantasies and roping in a disturbed epileptic headcase along the way.But before it gets there, it stages an extended prologue in which we meet her junky parents.Jennifer Tilley flails about in pursuit of a caricature of a mother who’d sentence any kid to three lifetimes of therapy, but all that comes out is a yelping bag of a lady, a regrettable incarnation that threatens decent notions like the first commandment.And sure enough, Gilliam kills her off after two scenes. When her husband, played by Jeff Bridges with little more than an assortment of tics and jaw crunches, finds the death of his baby’s mother a tad unsettling, his daughter tries to comfort him by telling him that now they can eat all her chocolate.Her suggestion doesn’t come off as a gag, nor is it underlined in the scene as an indicator of the girl’s loose grip on reality.It’s played more as a natural extension of the disdainful dynamic she had with her mother, established two scenes earlier in the movie.The little girl is not phased by mom’s death, because mom was a clingy jerk.Even this early on, Tideland feels pretty lost.

And while it’s Tideland that goes off the map so early, it’s the viewer who must navigate these spotty grounds, and the going ain’t easy.Bridges and his daughter flee their home after mom’s death.There are hints that Bridges thinks he’ll be blamed for the death – or perhaps murder – but the death, his paranoia, and daughter and dad’s flight are such obvious devices to get the movie going that any hang-ups about character motivation are obliterated by the transparency of the set-up.

Arriving in Tideland

Father and daughter catch a Greyhound out to the aforementioned wheat field to live in grandma’s house, a long-abandoned abode which boasts such well-punctuated graffiti as “Fuckin’ Shithole” on its interior.

Upstairs, the little girl spends some time chasing a talking squirrel in the wall, in the first of many mini-trajectories that make up Tideland, miniature narrative pursuits nestled within the viscous hodgepodge of fantasy and dementia that is this movie.Another one of these little flights concerns some of the girl’s friends, a collection of doll heads that she voices and talks to.When she goes to meet a neighbor and doesn’t want to bring the doll heads, Gilliam spends a lot of time on the girl’s mini-crisis: how will she get away from the doll heads without them getting suspicious or jealous?So a scene ensues in which she must try to put the doll heads to sleep.As the scene goes on (and on), it becomes clear that Tideland takes her task seriously.Any movie this stubborn about keeping a doll head lullaby from being a throwaway moment starts to mount up some intrigue in its favor, even though you can feel a palpable disconnect between the movie you’re watching and the one Gilliam thinks he’s making.

Elements don’t add up: on the tedious hunt for the squirrel, the music tries to cue moments of suspense that never register.When the little girl runs somewhere urgently, hurried along by the score, the camera moves lugubriously, too far away from her, almost stoic.The squirrel grows more eloquent every time he shows up, but his appearances never build to anything.

Navigating The Nefarious Bramble

In fact, nothing comes to much of anything in Tideland, and the only way to watch it is to get off on its abandon.Somewhere before the halfway mark, right around the time the little girl has gone nuts, as Bridges has begun giving the remainder of his performance as a corpse, right after the line “there isn’t a bee alive who doesn’t want me dead” is uttered, it becomes clear that this mess of a movie has no intention of straightening out.

By the time Tideland is really up and running, this is the kind of thing that flies: poised on the crest of yet another mini-arc within the story, the little girl and her epileptic pal are digging holes in the ground, looking for a lost doll head.The deafening sound of a passing train (or “monster shark,” in the parlance of the picture) punctuated by gunshots knocks them to the ground.The epileptic’s mom tears over a hill with a rifle in hand and pushes the little girl down a rabbit hole.If that’s not enough, as she falls down the rabbit hole, a copy of Alice in Wonderland floats by.When the little girl wakes up in her house she goes downstairs to see the epileptic’s mom kissing Bridges’ corpse, calling his post-mortem farts “sinister apples.”

The little girl’s doll heads begin talking without her help, her fantasies clash with her epileptic friend’s when she dislikes his imaginary submarine, and even nuclear paranoia finds its way into the story (albeit briefly).But there are strange stops along the way, and the rapid-fire dead-end episodes don’t stop flashing across the screen, building to such a confused mash-up of cursory themes and half-cocked ideas that Gilliam starts to get away with grotesqueries: near the end, we follow the little protagonist as she tries to get a peek at her epileptic pal’s pecker.But Gilliam plays these scenes with sincerity – as he did earlier with the doll heads’ bedtime story – and they start to register as moments of clarity.

Scenes begin to ricochet off one another, and a cacophonous din envelops the rocky path through Tideland.Even though it swells with fantasy and Gilliam shoots everything like a circus freak show, it’s not a grandiose affair.As the nonsense and the self-consciousness reaches a breaking point, they start to clear themselves away, and the distillation effect is perplexing and sometimes exciting.

Getting Out

As close to unwatchable as Tideland gets, it might be unique in that its central concern is to draw the descent of a preadolescent into complete madness.The movie gets lost in her head and never recovers (well, it never had much promise to begin with), and Gilliam is too ready to employ clichés like rabbit holes for the fragments to coagulate, but the fact that there’s something original simmering within this silliness (and you’ve really got to see it to comprehend the extent of it) speaks to the potential that can be found in making earnest attempts to navigate otherwise unrewarding terrain.

October 12, 2006

Nasal, bespectacled young men with questionable facial hair fraternized in front of Alice Tully Hall on Monday morning, happy, feral, and a little nervous.For them, the event of the season, if not the year, was about to transpire.We were at the New York Film Festival, and David Lynch’s Inland Empire was about to start.

In the auditorium, the energy was even swampier.It was crawling up the walls, congealing somewhere up in the balcony, and dripping down from the light fixtures. I tried not to let their nerdy giddiness get on my shirt – that stuff doesn’t rub out in the wash, and they were oozing the gooey stuff.I could smell it.A quantifiable nerdout was going down.

Kent Jones, critic at large and New York Film Festival fixture, emerged onstage and the crowd hushed.It was time to get down to business.Jones tried for a joke – “your flight time will be about three hours and there are absolutely no safety regulations” – that created an ear-popping vacuum.He announced that Lynch would be around for a Q & A session after the movie.“Great,” I whispered to my lady, before realizing what had escaped my lips.I leaned back over to her.“I mean, terrible.”She nodded.Q & A sessions tend to be dominated by the literal-minded, and a movie by such a cryptic storyteller as Lynch was sure to inspire some cringe-inducing questioning.

This anticipatory dread of the audience’s response did not leave my mind for a second during the screening of Inland Empire, as the existence of the film is implicitly contingent upon its fan base.It’s clear from watching this movie that Lynch, by cultivating a loyal fan base, has secured himself a place in movie culture that allows him to do absolutely whatever he wants.Lynch’s latest resides almost exclusively inside its executor’s own mind, and seems to have slipped out at the last second and splattered itself on the screen (or on Hollywood—I’ll get to that).It’s an egregious exercise in the art of Getting Away With It, and judging from the cacophonous clapping that Lynch’s coven of viewers rewarded it upon its conclusion, he’s pulled It off.

Of course, most in the audience were on board before the plane (as Jones would have it) even announced its destination.But for those of us who took our time settling in, the trip wasn’t nearly trippy enough.In the film’s first scene, one character asks another, “You know what whores do?”The response is obvious:“They fuck.”That logic, whether simple or superficial, suits Inland Empire just fine.As much as it self-consciously sets out to short circuit the synapses, it takes place on the surface.

In an unfortunate inversion of intent, Inland Empire defies integration, but not description:Laura Dern, an actress who gets a part that’s supposed to catapult her back to stardom.In orbit around her are lascivious Hollywood types, an other-dimension TV show and its teary viewer, two sets of Dern’s girlfriends, and a vague malaise cued by thunderous mood music.While shooting, her character’s identity fuses with that of the role she’s playing.Gradually, her grip loosens on reality, and upon running into a room on a soundstage, Dern’s character transforms into another person altogether, as the fake room is suddenly her grungy, real-life domicile.

Lynch made Inland Empire in pieces, shooting as he wrote, and it shows.The disparate elements of the movie interact, but only by coincidence, only because they came from the same mind, one that finds interminable fascination with unflattering portraits of shallow people pursuant of fame and wealth.The central story traces the same arc as that of Naomi Watts’ character in Mulholland Drive, and for the most part Inland Empire is little more than a footnote to Lynch’s earlier, more masterful film.

Inland Empire gets grotesque as it paints the entertainment world as a hellish wasteland.The relationship between the film’s initial universe of glitz and its Act III den of destitution posits a causal relationship between fakery and failure, even though the successful and the homeless are portrayed as equally demented.As Inland Empire descends concentric circles of the Hollywood inferno, Lynch goes literal with his disdain – Dern vomits blood on the Walk of Fame.The moment is about as complex as it sounds.

One of the problems with Inland Empire is that it’s not heavy enough.This is Lynch’s first foray into digital filmmaking, and the bantam cameras give the dream logic an airiness that detracts from the dash after the dark depths of consciousness.It feels too easy.In an early scene, Dern is visited by a foreboding fortuneteller, and the sequence contains the first instance of within-scene reality-bending, as one temporal field leaps to another.The fortuneteller points to an empty couch.The next shot is a new angle on Dern, a rule-breaking 180 degree switch, then a shot from her perspective, which is of the couch, which she is all of a sudden seated upon with her friends.Were the sequence on film, the relationship of shots would resonate much more deeply.Angle decisions and shot switcheroos carry more weight with heavier equipment because you can feel the decisions being made, and there’s a sense – however subconscious – of something serious happening between shots with strange spatial relationships.On digital, the images are fluttery, and because of the mobility and easy lighting you get with digital, shot relationships seem arbitrary.

As for the promised Q & A session, it wasn’t the audience that made it painful, but Lynch’s sermonizing from his pulpit on behalf of the Cult of the Self-Contained Idea.He’s gotten it in his head that any idea that gets him writing must have something to it, even if he’s not sure what it is, and it’s around this muddy mysticism that he made Inland Empire.There’s another way to read this:David Lynch has decided that he need not set any boundaries or obstacles for himself, that whatever he feels like shooting – even if he doesn’t know why – must have some value to a viewer.He’s abandoned the narrative constraints he played so effectively with in Mulholland Drive and has decided to use the camera as a lens onto his own dreaming id.The result is tennis without a net, the rote repetitions of an aging auteur, a child crying out for boundaries.

October 04, 2006

The new Michel Gondry picture, The Science of Sleep, has been out for a couple of weeks now, and I’ve had a tough time talking about it.When people ask me if I liked it, I mumble something about being confused by my own reaction.When they ask me if I’m going to write about it, I tell them I’m working on a screenplay that’s too depressing for me to be interested in love stories.But that’s a lie; I’m writing a treatment, not a screenplay, and I don’t look at The Science of Sleep as much of a love story.When I ask my pals what they thought of it, they are dismissive.They hate it.As one friend gifted in the art of distilled qualitative assessment put it, “It’s pure faggotry.”

And faggotry it is, in the way that it preens and prances in the form of its main character, Stéphane, played with fey light-footedness by Gael García Bernal.His character’s got no center, his nervousness is played with showy gestures and skittishness that sends him bouncing all over the frame.He’s exhausting to watch, because he’s doing so much and communicating so little.

There are plenty of other things wrong with Science, like its literal symbolism. Stéphane’s boss tells him to shave, and when he tries to do so that night, the electric razor injures him, becoming an easy embodiment of painful conformity.In one of his interminable fantasies, Stéphane imagines programming the razor to attack his boss, not to trim him, but to make his hair grow.Ugh.

The Science of Sleep is practically a procession of fantasy scenes like these, clunky stuff that doesn’t find an excuse to exist in what little reality there is in the movie. The dream sequences are illustrations of Stéphane’s wish for a mystical way to control his environment and, by extension, the girl he loves.Gondry has a blast constructing delirious illusions out of concrete objects for these scenes.Where others use blue screen, he uses double-projection.CGI effects aren’t as fun for Gondry as cellophane or stop-motion animation stuffed animals.While the other kids were discovering video games, Gondry was cutting construction paper, his tongue sticking out the side of his mouth.

The fantasy scenes may be the authorial voice celebrating the scene (okay, fine) or Gondry getting giddy with his own inventions (gag).Fantasies that result from Stéphane’s malfunctioning ego are self-involved, overstay their welcome, and – to make an admittedly easy accusation – would play fine as White Stripes videos but do not make good in narrative trifles like this little ditty.

These scenes of fantasy follow snippets of exposition with heavy-handed attempts at whimsy that would squash the light spirit of the movie, if it had one.And that’s where things get a little complicated.For all its appearance of a romance, Science is a bummer.It doesn’t work, it’s juvenile, it’s unbearably awkward.But it’s fascinating in the way it dismantles itself as it moves along, inverting its own joyfulness at every pass.Gondry’s stabbing some holes in this little love letter.It’s a bloody valentine, and that’s why I’ve had trouble talking about it.It’s a failure, but I’m kind of into it.

The center of a love story, the couple, is never really that tricky in movies.There’s an agreement between the movie and the audience that the audience will root for the couple to get together – if you’re not gonna get on board with the duo on the poster, you shouldn’t have plunked down any dough to watch them make passes at each other.But Gondry pushes the agreement past its contract with the coupling of Charlotte Gainsbourg and Bernal. These two are not charming, and are barely charmed by each other.Gondry’s got them speaking stilted English to each other, keeping their flirtery arrhythmic, eliminating any possibility of conversational ebb and flow that might get them canoodling. Stéphane’s state of pre-teen arrested development is anathema to the anorexic Gainsbourg’s stuffy, hypersensitive Stéphanie, a craft girl full of admonishments.

Still, we watch Stéphane give it his best shot, which involves useless lies about where he lives, breaking into Stéphanie’s apartment, crying in front of her, making himself all too available, and proffering premature proposals.It’s all a demented stab at courtship, an inept bid for attention, and an unapologetic display of ego. Chicks simply don’t dig that shit, dude.

And still, being aware of all this – and making us aware of all this – Gondry soldiers on through this grim escapade, this procession of music video set pieces, this jaded grade school art project.Giving two characters (and actors) so mismatched for each other practicallythe same name (Stéphane and Stéphanie) plays more like a sick joke than a cutesy conceit.For all its footwork and fanciness, Science of Sleep is a lover’s lament, a deeply unhappy movie about a guy who loses in love because he can’t balance his mental retardation with his joie de vivre and because – we find out in the confused and complicated finale – he’s a dick.

The central scenario of The Science of Sleep is dreadful in its familiarity.The girl wants to be friends.The boy wants to marry her, so tries to charm her.She’s not as much charmed as flattered, so entertains his advances, only to push him away when he gets his hopes up.It may not be a love story, but it is the story of a boy trying desperately to woo a girl, and watching it is just about as embarrassing as watching a boy trying desperately to woo a girl.In that is truth, and in truth is beauty.

August 30, 2006

Mutual Appreciation is a casual affair.It isn’t going after any big points, and it’s pretty unimpressed with itself.Mutual Appreciation’s chief function might be that it could help people relax a little.The characters in Andrew Bujalksi’s second feature don’t invent problems for themselves where there aren’t any. They’re not obsessed with ambition or success or Turning Thirty.Too many young people in New York busy themselves with questionable careers, exhausting internships, time-consuming continuing-education courses, obligatory friendships, and overwrought relationships, until they don’t have any time to enjoy living in the greatest city in the world.The easy-going, remarkably mature characters in New York-based Mutual Appreciation aren’t scrambling around trying to make grown-ups of themselves by plugging themselves into institutions and chasing success.Time passes languidly in Bujalksi’s world, and its denizens are unique in the genre of post-college comedies because they’re not anxious about it.They could have our generation lightening up.I want this to be the movie that people my age identify with.I want my friends back.

Mutual Appreciation is so easily familiar with its characters that I feel almost friendly with them.Let me introduce you to my new pals:Justin Rice plays Alan with effortless likeability, an indy rock musician who’s just moved from Boston to New York.Rachel Clift plays Ellie with comfortable confidence, even in awkward scenes that overstay their welcome.Bujalski plays Lawrence, college T.A., boyfriend of Ellie, and old friend of Alan.Bujalksi is threatening to quit acting in his own pictures, but I doubt he’ll find an actor who brings the same genuine everydude quality that his polite, pockmarked mug adds to Mutual Appreciation.

Bujalksi’s films (his first was 2002’s Funny Ha Ha) draw regular comparisons to Cassavetes, Mike Leigh, and Eustache, but no one is pointing out that Mutual Appreciation is singular in its fascination with low-stakes human interaction in a way that sets it apart from those filmmakers, and from most any film of its kind.The emotional crises of Cassavetes, the class and survival concerns of Leigh, the artsy angst of Eustache would all stand out like deliberate crutches in Mutual Appreciation, a very loose narrative hung upon a series of anticlimaxes, an exercise in low-key undercutting of payoff expectations.Bujalksi has jettisoned the most sanctified rule of storytelling—the one that dictates that every scene must be infused with locatable conflict.We are left to simply watch peoples’ behavior, how they navigate their own comings and goings, and their attractions to one another.

The closest thing to a central conflict in Mutual Appreciation is Alan and Ellie’s amorous feelings toward one another, but its admission and consequences come so late in the film that it’s almost an afterthought.You’ve already picked up that something lingers beneath their platonic friendship, but the feel of the film is so effortlessly observant that nothing must necessarily come of it the way it must in a typical narrative.When Noah Baumbach’s seminal twentysomething comedy Kicking and Screaming (to which Bujalksi’s films are sometimes compared) traces a cheating fling between friends, it reeks of imported conflict; it’s there to juice up the story.But what Mutual Appreciation accomplishes – and this is not minor – is that it lets its audience watch its characters with the same pleasure you watch your friends.By taking out conventional conflict, Bujalksi loosens his film enough to let audiences feel comfortable killing time in the apartments and bars the movie hangs out in.By the time he gets to the scene in which Ellie and Alan decide not to make love, it could go in any direction.The impression of improvised performances and feeling of the loosey-goosey camera work stave off any narrative predetermination, not to mention aesthetic pretense, so you get the feeling that you’re watching behavior, rather than vessels acting out a filmmaker’s idea of what they represent.

One of the most unexpectedly electrifying scenes in Mutual Appreciation is the one in which Ellie tells Lawrence she had a “weird moment” with Alan when they confessed their attraction to one another.The key to the scene isn’t any unburdening of guilt – Ellie didn’t really do anything – but how Lawrence will respond to it.Bujalski and his actors have made such a relaxed job of relaying incisive observations about minor moments in human behavior and interaction that my expectations were running high when Ellie made her confession.And for what, really?Ellie hasn’t done anything, she just wants to be honest.And Lawrence is a level-headed guy, he won’t blow his top, that much is clear.So what’s happening in the scene is that the audience is excited and anxious about what will certainly not be a climactic moment.Lawrence digests the information and goes into the kitchen.Ellie follows him and when he finally speaks he begins with “It’s frustrating because …”His opening is exactly the kind of deliberate wording that people use to mean “I have to say something here, and I’m about to do it, but there’s no way that it can be meaningful enough to fill the space you just created between us.”He doesn’t get mad, as there’s nothing to be mad about.He responds honestly, without self-importance, making an effort to close the gap between him and Ellie, not indulging himself or the audience in a screaming match, as would happen in a Cassavetes picture.

What’s so impressive about Mutual Appreciation is that it manages to portray so casually people who are in fact remarkably singular and mature.It feels good to get to know these people, and you actually do.Not the way they react in trauma or heartbreak, just the way they behave and live their lives.There isn’t anything outwardly or physically impressive about most of the characters, but Mutual Appreciation manages to get close enough to show us that we could probably learn a thing or two from them.

August 14, 2006

Watching Naked Spur, or any of Anthony Mann’s movies from the era before 1954, at which point the frame doubled in width to a grotesque vastness, I scream “Down with CinemaScope!”Revisiting Mann’s deep and vertical compositions begs a return to the squarish, 1.33:1 aspect ratio, within which directors had to choose what they wanted to look at and trace movement in depth rather than lean on all-encompassing long shots featuring figures scatteringon the screen trying to figure out where they belong.

Perhaps this sounds counterintuitive.So much of our movie-thinking has to do with that rectangular frame.It’s how we think about movies, and it has accomplished its initial commercial conceit: to differentiate movies from television.But as widescreen, flat televisions are being mounted to more and more walls, and television shows are being shot in a widescreen format, that distinction is breaking down, and it’s worth considering the merits of the formats in the context of their filmic associations rather than arbitrary or commercial ones.It’s been on my mind since I saw an earlier Anthony Mann movie at Film Forum, 1949’s Reign of Terror, an expressionistic frenzy of a film about the French Revolution in which the jagged forms that surround the characters are composed vertically, which I was astounded to realize I found unfamiliar.

The fiftieth birthday of CinemaScope passed recently, and it received some complimentary articles and a tasteful series of screenings at Walter Reade devoted to great widescreen works like McCabe and Mrs. Miller and Pierrot Le Fou.But at the time of its inception, not all of our great directors received the innovation with great enthusiasm.Howard Hawks in Interviews With Film Directors in 1956:

We have spent a lifetime learning how to compel the public to concentrate on one single thing.Now we have something that works in exactly the opposite way, and I don’t like it very much … You don’t have to bother about what you should show – everything’s on the screen.

Along with ruining the sacred art of the close-up and making vertical movement on screen a troublesome task, the invention of CinemaScope (and any number of widescreen variants) gave directors an obligation to lateral movement, taking away the more filmic concern with depth.CinemaScope is an outward-sprawling canvas; it’s Monet’s Water Lilies.It’s almost intrinsically flat.It opens the frame so wide that intimate scenes either contain ineffective negative space or imported clutter that’s supposed to occupy the otherwise-empty portions of the frame.The academy ratio feels more like the extension of the lens, which is only as wide as it is tall.It’s more suited for peering than painting.Deep framing can give a stronger sense of space, because a director has to move through a space.Figures in Naked Spur tend to move from left to right to open a shot, then either towards the camera or away from it.Even though Mann sometimes uses mattes, the pleasant realism comes from the feel of movement across more spatial planes than just lateral ones, a must for a trail movie (western variant of road movie) like Naked Spur.Even in the non-traveling scenes, the square is where it’s at:a sequence in which Jimmy Stewart falls from a mountainside is energized by the verticality of the frame; cliff-edge wrestling matches are edgier, set into relief against treetops below, enhanced by the frame’s freedom from wideness.CinemaScope would cover too much of the ledge without an awareness of height.

Manny Farber was the critic who got me to watch and understand Mann’s movies, and the release of Naked Spur on DVD makes available the four trail movies made with Stewart that were shot in the square format: Winchester ’73 (1950), Bend of the River (1952), The Naked Spur (1953), and The Far Country (1954).Farber was obsessed with space in movies, and I think that the way Mann used the academy ratio has everything to do with Farber’s appreciation of him.The academy ratio necessitates depth of field because the only way Mann can get everything he wants in the tight frame is to use three spatial planes.He does it everywhere, even in dialogue scenes.Next to a campfire, Robert Ryan tries to turn Millard Mitchell against Stewart.Ryan is in the middle.Stewart is pushed to the back of the frame, which is appropriate, as he always wants to avoid conversations about character.Mann’s compositions are commentaries on Stewart’s amoral behavior (in the beginning of the film, he enlisted Mitchell to help capture Ryan by entertaining the misunderstanding that he was a sheriff).Mann gives Stewart nowhere to go but back, where we’ll still see him, and he boxes him in on the left and right, making him uncomfortable, less trustworthy. Mitchell’s in the foreground, trying to figure out what side to take, and it works well because the camera is shooting past him, avoiding a sentimentalization of his character’s quandary.These particulars are lost in CinemaScope, as Howard Hawks pointed out in theabove quote.

The essential qualities of movies are found in their treatment of time and space, elements unique to the medium, and in a trail movie like Naked Spur the space game is heightened.The sensations of movement in Naked Spur come from its sense of travel through the frame, into it, rather than across it.There isn’t enough room to create a sense of space alongside the characters (see Eastwood’s Unforgiven); Mann has to do it behind them or in front of them, which is when he’s at his best.The loving portraiture of the landscape becomes psychological, the movement self-perpetuating.The movie itself becomes a journey by expanding into itself, deep into the frame, while collapsing the audience’s distance from the places portrayed.Perhaps it is not a coincidence that the only CinemaScope Mann-Stewart western, The Man From Laramie, is their most stationary.Manny Farber said that John Ford “doesn’t give a fuck about the country out there … He has no curiosity about land or ground.”But Mann’s frames and affections run deep, and his sense of movement, landscape, and emotional geography show that there has not been a better director of westerns.

July 21, 2006

The set-up in Lady in the Water – janitor (Paul Giamatti) finds naked lady (Bryce Dallas Howard) in pool and they go back to his place – would be delicious if M. Night Shyamalan wasn’t the least sexy marquee director in the history of American movies.While his hero Steven Spielberg finally broke into the bedroom last year in the demented sex scene in Munich, Shyamalan is still so hung up on kids’ stuff that he doesn’t deign to bother with something as sweaty and icky as lust.But this may be the first of his movies in which the needs of the nethers are so conspicuously absent: even when Cleveland Heep, a lonely janitor (read “horny”), is greeted in his living room by a naked 25-year-old in the beckoning form of the full-bodied Bryce, he’d rather nap than tap.Any chance of some Splash antics is out of the question, as Cleveland is so chaste it’s perverted.Back in 1984, Tom Hanks tried to bust down the door while his mermaid houseguest was in the bath.These days our hero is constantly telling his waterlogged guest to put some clothes on.And while he’s at it, Shyamalan has managed to make the otherwise enticing Bryce Dallas Howard look about as invigorating as a smooth-down-there E.T. doll.

Once it’s established that nothing untoward is going to go down in pool house, the stiff gears of the story get grinding.It turns out that this lady from another world has crossed into ours because she must look into the eyes of a chosen person for some vague – but doubtlessly very important – reason before she can return to the Blue World, so Cleveland decides to help out.Strangely, his main motivation seems to be to get the girl out of his place, a narrative device that threatens to confuse healthy boys in the audience and delay the sexual development of shy ones.

It’s fitting that Shyamalan’s movie – which posits the provocative idea that men aren’t obsessed with screwing – would have a masturbatory central conceit.Namely, that stories – by nature of their mere construction – possess efficaciousness in and of themselves.This is why we spend the majority of our time with this movie watching its script and its characters pursue the story they inhabit.This is why Shyamalan operates under the presumptive delusion that his audience will get a kick out of cataloguing the meanings of fabricated mythology nouns like “scrunt” and “narf.”This is why Shyamalan can let Cleveland almost drown when it suits the purposes of the story, but later invests him with Aquaman breath-holding capabilities.This is why he names the nominal lady “Story.”And this is why Lady in the Water spends the majority of its duration chasing its tale, with Story sitting in the shower or lounging sexlessly in Cleveland’s pool house while the dumb bastard scrambles all over the apartment complex trying to gather up real-life corollaries for the dubious legend that Story communicates in awkward fits and starts.The fetishization of self-serving storytelling is also the reason Shyamalan casts himself as a writer whose words will save the world.While he would never subject us to something as repellent as an actual sex scene, he’s perfectly willing to wank off all over us.

The strange brew that results is a movie that wears suspense and fanciful fantasy on its sleeve, but manages to spend a lot of time in the hallway and the bathroom, trying to gather up enough narrative threads to spin an effective yarn.The origins of the movie’s quizzical nature are sowed in the banal exposition scenes, as Cleveland stands in the hallway, passing a cell phone back and forth with a hostile grandmother who doesn’t speak English.Cleveland is literally trying to find out the plot of the story he’s in, and the camera strands him in the corridor with irksome confidence.It doesn’t work, and the dialogue barely makes sense, but any pretense of real cohesion is dropped so early in the movie that it doesn’t matter.Critics Manohla Dargis and Michael Atkinson are concerned that M. Night Shyamalan might have “lost his marbles” or “lost his mind,” respectively.Would that it were true.Any madman worth his confetti doesn’t spend this much time deliberating over deus ex machina.

The kind of story-for-its-own-sake whimsy practiced here opens up the unraveling structure, creating a loosely woven canvas – much different from the laconic, locked-into-place, linear layout of The Sixth Sense or Signs.It also admits an intriguing, unreflective visual style.Most of the movie is shot with a camera that seems on the verge of head-butting residents of The Cove.An early poolside scene is covered with ashy murkiness, obscuring the action and faces as a key scene plays out.

Lady in the Water isn’t a heady enough mix of self-conscious clichés and kiddy post-modernism for the deliberate self-reflexive stuff to carry: when Bob Balaban’s stiff-backed film critic (ostentatiously named Farber, as in Manny) describes the scene he’s in and then sums up the movie up to that point, it’s pure tomfoolery, there for its own sake, much like the childish mythmaking of Lady in the Water.

June 20, 2006

In the mid-sixties, Richard Lester was hung up on fun – judging by his Beatles movies and his lovely lark The Knack, I’d say he had a fun fetish, a perversion towards filmed pleasure.So what’s a suspicious bummer like Petulia doing in Lester’s oeuvre, this movie that puts a curmudgeon divorcee at its center?Dig Dick’s 1968 outing where the hippies are sardine thieves and even when a woman’s life’s at stake they don’t wanna Help! Is this Lester’s apologia?Are we reading his letter of resignation from the sixties, beating the clock by two years?And is that why there are so many watches in this movie?The Hippie Generation’s turned out to be the Pepsi Generation, and they’re just as pursuant of middle class comfort as the Greatest Generation. “You swinging marrieds,” Archie spits at Petulia when she won’t turn a quick one with him in a mod hotel.

Or is Petulia suspect for evidence of a sudden shift to sophistication, the sign Lester was fed up with his little rock and roll movies for girls with cheeks still damp from the ’64 Sullivan Show?Petulia could be his Interiors – he doesn’t want to make funny movies anymore, he’s done running and jumping.But can he keep from simply standing still?

Whatever its raison d’etre, Petulia is a splendid affair, more adventurous than Lester’s previous pictures, with tons more ideas.It verges on the elegiac, and a more appropriate director for a send-off to the sixties does not come to mind.In its structure of flashbacks/forwards and deep cynicism about marriage, it resides on some kind of terrific trajectory together with other tailspins like Two For the Road and Bad Timing, the latter which happens to have been directed by Nicholas Roeg, the cinematographer of Petulia.

Despite the proclamations of the suits on the DVD’s obligatory Present Day Production-Of Featurette, Petulia is not an exaltation of its era.It looks more like a living funeral live from Haight-Ashbury than a look from inside the lava lamp.The hippie cars are rolling backwards and babies are turning up at Dead parties.In the middle of the muck is George C. Scott’s Archie, an iconoclast curmudgeon underdressed for the ceremonies, stepping over the hippie gravestones with a grimace rather than a condolence.

Lester probably thinks Archie’s a pretty good guy who’s trying to figure out how much decency has got to do with value, a guy who’s got no pretensions about his own unimportance and even satirizes his own insignificance:Archie cribs other people’s cute little phrases with regularity, grudgingly having a gas generating a cipher out of himself. “All that broken glass,” he echoes back to Petulia when he finds out she’s not the window-breaking type she claims.Archie’s got enough contempt to go around, and he’s zealous about it to the point of swallowing other people’s words and hocking them out like so much phlegm.

When Archie’s not too pissed off, he drops the Bunker routine and dotes on Petulia, a mixed up chick who lugs around tubas instead of flowers – bouquets would be too easy for a girl like her, wouldn’t they?This gal is the positive personification of a groovy generation on its way out.She’s married to a mannequin and picks up stiff doctors like Archie with self-consciously counter-cultural quips like “I’ve been married six months and haven’t had an affair.”

Once the adultery gets gyrating, Lester starts cutting all over the place, mixing up a collage of flashforwards and flippant fragments that fascinate the viewer with a feeling for forecast.If the temporal dislocation isn’t just a stylistic pretension (it isn’t), we’ve got to make something of where the glimpses of past/future are landing.The flashes could be thoughts or memories, but they also might be tantalizing puzzle pieces laid out, arranging the whole narrative around itself.Implicit is the hope that we care enough to be intrigued and not put off by editing MacGuffins there to peak our interest rather than inject anything into the content.But when little Oliver – Petulia’s Mexican adoptee –gets run over while a menacing Joseph Cotton longs for Petulia’s murder next to her hospital bed (his son should be able to kill her for her adultery, he implies), the relationship of shots looks like cause-effect and the structure of Petulia works the themes into the cuts.You can hear Lester snickering behind the hospital curtain: “Old fashioned mores are absolutely murder!”

All the cutting around – exchanging one image for a similar one and entering a scene so jarring in its difference that it’s grotesque – results in some implicit symbiosis of character traits and motivations.The further Oliver gets from Petulia & David the more Archie tries to sew things up with his brood, and you can be pretty sure that Archie never beats Polo or Petulia because David’s got the anti-lady violence at its capacity, which is a good thing for Arch and happens to lend some sharp ambiguity to Dave’s proclamation that only a man of utter weakness would beat a woman.

Petulia’s distaste for marriage carries through to the end, as opposed to its somewhat saccharine contemporary Two For the Road.The baby at the Dead party doesn’t seem so much like a sign of decadence as an emblem of crummy responsibility creeping into the counter-culture, and Petulia’s return to David seems symbolic of the inevitable crumbling of the Fun Revolution.And Lester’s even got Archie breaking into Alcatraz.I mean, how jadedly metaphorical do you wanna get?